BY CHRIS GAETANO
Staff Writer
Dayton’s Evan Sooby, 5, is a bit small to drive this fire truck at the Mapleton Preserve on Saturday. Five years of negotiations and collaborations between South Brunswick, Princeton University, Princeton Nurseries, the Department of Environmental Protection and the state Green Acres program culminated in the preservation of 200 acres of land for open space on April 30. The land, once the Princeton Nursery and now called the Mapleton Preserve, was officially opened to the public during a Saturday celebration.
Visitors to the preserve will be able to use the trails to go hiking, and it has also been touted as an ideal site for bird-watching. There are several branching paths for walking, with straight walls of trees lining the sides of many of them, though whether to allow bikes is still being debated. The property will also be used as the headquarters for the Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park, which sits nearly adjacent to the Mapleton Preserve. The management of the preserve itself will be in the hands of the newly created Mapleton Preserve Commission.
CHRIS KELLY staff Evelyn Volk, Mercerville, looks over one of the information booths at the Mapleton Preserve opening on Saturday in Kingston. The property itself, located in Kingston, is the site of what, according to Vicki Chirco, a historian with the DEP, is one of the oldest and most famous tree nurseries in the nation. Established in 1913, it is where some of the most famous trees in the world have been created through careful cross-pollination techniques. Such well-known specimens as the October glory maple and the Green Mountain sugar maple are samples of the new species that have been bred at the site.
At one point, the nursery covered 1,500 acres, though as the years went on, bits and pieces were sold off. Meanwhile, the company had been expanding into nearby Allentown around the late 1960s, with the Kingston site being phased out entirely in the late 1990s. South Brunswick got involved with the remaining tract left behind shortly after that.
Residents in Kingston who wanted the area preserved approached the township in the hopes of creating an open space buffer zone, or “green belt,” between that part of town and the development. The township had been aware of the remaining 200-acre parcel of land and felt that its preservation was a high priority.
“This land was zoned [for residential use], so the Open Space Committee was always concerned. It’s 200 acres of land over here. We could have had over 200 homes on this parcel of land, which could be devastating to not only the Village of Kingston but to South Brunswick, to our school system, for all of these things, so it was very high on the priority list,” said Mayor Frank Gambatese.
In order to act upon this priority, however, a number of hoops had to be jumped through. Princeton University, which bought the property in the 1980s, wanted $100,000 an acre for the land, a price the township could not pay. In 2003, a deal was brokered between the town and the university where, in exchange for the land, the township would allow the university to build a research and development complex on Route 1, giving the university 75 acres of land and rezoning the area to allow this.
This deal set aside a portion of the land. The remainder of the land was bought by the state Green Acres program, again, after long bouts of negotiation, costing them $2.5 million.
“A lot of people said, ‘It’s not going to happen, the project is too ambitious, there’s too many players involved, there’s different owners, there’s the project owner.’ But you know what? We didn’t walk away from it because it was difficult. We continued to work at it and work at it, and we were able to accomplish that,” said Councilman Chris Killmurray, who was on the township’s Open Space Committee when the proposal first came up.
“This parcel of land, to me, is unique. It will be forever preserved in its natural state. There will be, maybe, some walking trails put through, but overall, it’s going to remain exactly as it is and hopefully people will be able to just walk in here and enjoy the beauty. When the leaves change color, let me tell you, it’s gorgeous,” said Gambatese.
Gambatese was recognized that same day by the New Jersey Historic Sites Council for his efforts in acquiring Princeton Nurseries at the annual preservation awards ceremony.