by Valerie Hurley ·
Friday, January 23, 2026
Changes at the town’s only park, Harvard Park on Lancaster County Road, are set to begin this spring with construction of a new bicycle track, while renovations to the park’s running track and playing field are scheduled to begin this summer.
Renovations at McCurdy Track can begin in June if design and bidding go as planned, according to Town Administrator Dan Nason’s Tuesday report to the Select Board. The outdoor track, the playing field, and the track and field events area will be refurbished and made compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. New construction will include stairs from the parking lot to the field, upgraded spectator seating, and a gravel path between the park and the nearby Harvard Senior Center.
The renovations are estimated at $2.6 million and the money will come from several sources. Town Meeting of May 2025 voted to allocate $600,000 from fiscal 2026 community preservation funds as a down payment for the project. The vote included a commitment from the Community Preservation Committee to make annual payments on a borrowing to pay for the rest of the project. A $1 million state grant, awarded to Harvard last October, will partially reimburse the town for the borrowed money.
While the design, bidding, and permitting for McCurdy Track unfolds this spring, a circular bicycle course known as a pump track will take shape in the woods behind the track. Pump tracks are built with banked turns and other features that let riders generate momentum not by pedaling, but by up-and-down body movements. The Conservation Commission approved the Park and Recreation Commission’s “notice of intent“ to build the track last fall, a plan prepared pro bono by former resident and civil engineer Bruce Ringwall. It will be built with dirt and occupy about 2 acres in the center of an existing looped, nonpaved path that is now used by the public and by the cross-country team.
Those uses will continue to “coexist,” Recreation Director Anne McWaters told the Press last week, though cross-country meets will be relocated during construction. “I see it as a community and family thing. So many young people love bicycling, and the track gets them off the roads,” she said. “It’s not for dirt bikes or motorized vehicles.” And it will be constructed by volunteer labor, McWaters said.
One of those volunteers is resident Todd Currie, who told the Press that he and fellow bicycle enthusiast Roger Cameron are leading the effort to fundraise for and build the pump track. With only a few thousand dollars raised so far, Currie said fundraising has yet to kick off, but a November cleanup at the site attracted many families eager to advance the project. The group will not hire third parties but will work with the screened loam—not concrete or asphalt—themselves, he said. Trees are not to be removed, according to the plan.
Maintaining the track after it is built will also fall to the volunteers; McWaters said she intends to draw up a maintenance agreement and that if it isn’t kept, the track would be allowed to revert to woods.
In answer to a question about the potential risk of using volunteer labor, Nason praised the people who donate work to the town. But he acknowledged that, depending on the project, the risk factor around liability and maintenance occupies “a gray area.”
More information about the volunteer group and its quest to build the bicycle course can be found on its Facebook page, “Harvard Pump Track.”