Please join us on Sunday, October 21st at 4:00 PM at the Brookfield Historical Society Annual Meeting for the fascinating history of New England's history and legacy created by the settlement patterns of our Town Forests, and specifically Brookfield's Town Forest.

The program, presented by long-time Brookfield resident Jon Binhammer and Brookfield Town Forester, will explain community-owned forests that began in the settlement patterns of the English countryside – clusters of houses surrounded by common land utilized mostly for pasture. Later in the 19th century, depleted forests became a public concern. Wildfires in eastern states sparked by locomotives burned thousands of acres of slash left from clear cut logging. Vermont slowly followed this national trend, with the first State Forest established in 1909, the L.R. Jones State Forest, located on Spruce Mountain in the Groton Range. Brookfield's Town Forest, 169 acres located on Halfway Brook Road, was enabled in 1955 by the vote of townspeople at Town Meeting..

Place: 4:00 PM at the Fellowship Hall in the Pond Village Church–First Congregational Church, 49 N. Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont, 05036. A potluck supper will follow the program after a brief BHS Annual Meeting, our 85th. Come one, come all and bring a dish if you can.