Leominster, MA

Johnny Appleseed at last is going to get his own orchard.

When the absentee owner of a 169-acre farm in Leominster, Mass., filed a plan with the town to subdivide the property into 161 building lots, residents of the town started a grassroots campaign to preserve the land, which includes a 52-acre apple orchard.

Why the outburst of civic passion?

For one thing, Sholan Farms is one of the last large undeveloped parts of Leominster (pop. 37,263).

For another, Leominster—pronounced the English way, Lem-in-ster—is the home of Johnny Appleseed, and a housing development would have erased the last apple orchard in town.

Thanks to the prompt action of the town, and its willingness to buy the property, Sholan Farms now will be preserved and restored, with a working apple orchard and hiking and biking trails that will be part of some 2,000 acres of linked conservation properties.

“We can’t afford not to make that commitment,” says Mayor Dean J. Mazzarella. “It’s critical to (our) character and future.”

As is true in so many towns across the country, the community in north-central Massachusetts is under considerable development pressure, with its mixed rural and manufacturing economy leaning toward a role as a bedroom community of Boston.

In 1774, when John Chapman was born in Leominster, farming was the only way of life for miles around. As a young man, he began traveling through the Midwest, leaving apple seeds wherever he went and earning his famous nickname.

Small wonder that Mazzarella’s bulletin board is covered with hand-printed letters from schoolchildren imploring the town to save Sholan Farms.

Fortunately, its owners were cooperative in negotiating the sale of the land to the town. The price tag of more than $1 million indicates the level of public support for the preservation project. Only the final details, including whether a conservation organization should be invited to manage the property, remain to be worked out in the months to come.

“It’s been a long and difficult process” to buy the land, says Mazzarella, but “everybody in Leominster” supports the purchase, from the schoolchildren to the city council, and money is being raised to help restore and improve Sholan Farms.

The property is just at the edge of town, in an area where large new homes are beginning to sprout. A huge dilapidated barn will be renovated and turned into a small retail outlet for apples and other goods. The schools will use the property for nature walks and environmental classes. Eventually there will be a Johnny Appleseed museum and a school for orchard skills.

“Last year was the first year the orchard wasn’t cultivated,” Mazzarella notes. “We’re going to turn that around and make it a working orchard again.”

Sholan Farms isn’t just undeveloped land, it’s a jewel in the crown of conservation land that Leominster has acquired in the 1990s. That happened when the town put together an open space plan and actively began working to protect its watershed and preserve a balance between development and peaceful rural character.

The orchard, with its neatly planted rows of apple trees, low to the ground and well-tended to be productive, commands sweeping views of the countryside, with low hills and, far to the east, the twinkling lights of a distant town as twilight falls. The barn faces a town road, with the hillside sloping down behind it, but the orchard climbs the hill across the road as well, rising to the forest beyond.

The land, the barn, the orchard, and the work it’s going to require in the years ahead all would make John Chapman feel right at home. And thanks to Leominster’s decision to protect its heritage, generations of schoolchildren will have the opportunity to follow in Johnny Appleseed’s footsteps.

Laurence Michie is a freelance writer who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

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