The property consists of 800 acres straddling Lawrence and Hopewell townships
By:John Tredrea
It’s a place where people have been so scarce for so long that some of the birds are docile to the point where they’ll play games with you or so it seems.
And it’s a place where you can experience a certain type of relief so powerful that it’s almost intimidating. This relief surfaces when you stand perfectly still, breathe as silently as possible and, while seeing nothing but flora and fauna, realize you cannot hear a trace of a sound of any motor of any kind.
This is how it can be on nearly 800 acres straddling Hopewell and Lawrence townships. Long known locally as The Pole Farm because of the still-standing tall pole, next to some farm buildings off Federal City Road, south of Rosedale Park the land was purchased by Mercer County several years ago and is slated to become, some years down the road, Mercer County Park Northwest.
It looks nothing like a park now. There are no parking lots, no signs, no amenities of any kind. Just long stretches of woodlands, criss-crossed by little streams, dotted by bogs and pleasantly interrupted by long, wide fields that were first cleared a very long time ago and haven’t been tilled for years. The fields yield no crops now, but have become long, wide meadows, gorgeous artifacts of the days when agriculture was the dominant aspect of Hopewell Valley’s landscape.
The tract of land that will become one of the biggest parks in the Mercer area is bisected by the Lawrence-Hopewell border and framed by Blackwell, Cold Soil, Keefe, Federal City and Pennington-Lawrenceville roads.
On the first of numerous visits, we my dog, Bessie, a 9-year-old black Lab, and I entered the tract from Blackwell Road, off a small, gravel parking lot, about midway between Federal City and Cold Soil roads.
Cross Blackwell Road from this lot, which is surrounded by posts that look like they were made by chopping an old utility pole into sections, and you’re on a northern edge of the land the county park system acquired from AT&T. In front of you is a big field that, right now, is home to about a million sprigs of poison ivy and maybe twice that many wood ticks.
Looking to your left that is, to the east, and toward Cold Soil Road you’ll see several of the bright yellow posts that mark the right-of-way of a transcontinental gas pipe line. Looking southeast from these posts, you’ll see a gap in the trees. Going through it, you wind up on a dirt farm road, obviously built a long time ago, that runs all the way to the intersection of Cold Soil and Keefe roads. Running in the middle of the old dirt road is a raised green ribbon of wild grass, weeds and small wildflowers. Walking along this thing, you can feel sort of like, well, Tennessee ca. 1850. It’s all right.
Other roads and paths on the 800 acres can be accessed from this road. The future park is so big that one could probably walk around in it all day without ever going the same way twice. Some of the walking is rough going, and/or very muddy. There are little bogs and ponds tucked in the trees here and there, and in some of the dense, wide areas of underbrush the roar of insects is so loud, high-pitched and powerful that it sounds like some kind of final insanity.
Vestiges of long-gone farm life are found regularly the crumbling concrete remains of foundations of outbuildings, and a small, rusted-out tractor that has been surrounded by trees so close together and choked with vines so thick that the machine will be invisible to passers-by until winter clears all the leaves away again.
Walking around the old Pole Farm and, as likely as not, seeing no other people at all, one notices that turkey vultures as many as a half a dozen often tag idly along, sometimes lowering their altitude and making things feel spooky.
"You’re wasting your time, I’m gonna live for a long time, so get lost!" The vultures ignore such cries, of course, and continue to follow along, the huge flying muscles inside their wings clearly visible when the sun hits them right.
If you follow the dirt road all the way to the end, you’ll see a small paved road branch off it, to the northwest. On the edge of a field skirting this road are five pairs of birdhouses, each pair about 30 yards apart.
Living in these houses are small, pretty birds with grayish-blue markings against an off-white background. About two months ago, I noticed that about 30 of these birds were playing in the area around the 10 houses. It looked like they were playing tag with one another. Clearly, they were having a real blast, trying to lose one another by making unpredictable hairpin turns around branches of trees or the birdhouses.
Then one of the birds flew right at me, at a casual sort of velocity, about shoulder high. He didn’t veer off to the side until he was about 18 inches away. I’m quite sure he was literally within arm’s length. Needless to say, birds in town don’t do that stuff. Then, to my disbelief, he came back and did it again, and flew around me in a circle after he did it. Then he assuming it was a he chased another bird about a third of the way across the field, toward Twin Pines Airport. Then they both came back my way and zoomed around like madcaps, in and out of the trees, bringing other birds into the game of tag or chase or hide and seek or whatever it was.
I haven’t seen any bears in there. But I did see the biggest wasp or bee nest I’ve even anywhere. It’s embedded in the ground in a grassy lane that’s turning back into woods, near an old wire fence about a half-mile east of Federal City Road. It was still winter when I saw the nest, so all was quiet. But the top of the thing looked like a barrel-head. It was literally that big. It’s nothing to trip over this time of year, so keep your eye peeled for it if you’re out that way and here’s hoping you have a nice walk. An hour out there can change a whole week for the better.
Staff Writer John Tredrea is a Pennington resident who often has taken long strolls through one or another of the Valley’s most pristine areas.