Potsherding: Lessons in Storytelling & Conservancy: Part 2

Two Farms

In Shelburne, Massachusetts, are two places where I have made images over the years that call to mind my time potsherding with Darrell.  Bardwell Farm and Foxbard Farm have provided me with ample opportunity to create images that I hope tell at least a bit of their story—a story of conservancy in the face of economic and cultural change.  Here in the Pioneer Valley many active and once active farms like Bardwell and Foxbard are protected under schemes of conservancy that extinguish virtually all rights of future development.  Those schemes have left Bardwell and Foxbard’s pastoral appeal largely intact and protected from future development through government and private agricultural conservancy programs, even though to some such farms no longer make economic sense in the face of the ever-present spectre of profit driven development of our modern world.  Over time, I have traipsed these farms, Darrell’s lessons at hand, seeking the hand worked relic among the upturned shingle.  Not only are these Farms within a mile and half of each other perched on the rolling foothills of the Berkshires, they share a common and extended history that culminated in their both being placed in conservation trusts. 

At about the time of the American Revolutionary War, Enoch Bardwell, Jr., and his father each established farms atop the hills of Shelburne—a town so named for William Petty Fitzmaurice, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, known as The Earl of Shelburne, British Prime Minister for part of that War.  Over their first 200 years, the farms yielded various agricultural products including dairy and beef cattle, vegetables, hay, apples and timber products.  Now, large portions of each Farm are maintained under certain conservancy restrictions that allow agricultural and forest management, but prohibit major alterations to the land including removal for sale of stone walls or gravel excavation, among others.  These restrictions also apply to future development.  Today, while the Bardwell Farm is limited to cultivation of hay crops, Foxbard maintains several head of beef cattle and responsibly harvest cordwood as part of their forest management plans.  Over several months I repeatedly visited these farms to make images applying Darrell’s lessons in discerning the finished, crafted, stonework tool from the prosaic, dirt covered, anonymous shard of stone in the furrows and so doing, trying to tell a bit of the story of these farms.  At least that was my goal.

My vantage point at Foxbard, one of Shelburne’s original farms, stands atop a grass covered outcrop among acres of hayfields bordered by forested hills.  As autumn approached, fog collected more and more in a low-lying wetland to the north of my outcrop and during the ever-cooler mornings, the trees in the surrounding peaks went from overpowering green to subtler shades of orange, umber, yellow and red.  Fog filtered into the fields to my south as well, favoring my images with atmosphere and mood.  The peaceful, bucolic look and feel of the rolling fields, colorful low wetland and surrounding woodlands redounds not only its idyllic location in the hills of Western Massachusetts, but also the circumstance of much of that farmland being held in conservation trust by the town of Shelburne assisted by the Franklin Land Trust.  Not only does this arrangement preserve the land largely in its current state while providing an income for Foxbard’s resident owners, it promotes wildlife habitat and healthy woodlands through a long-term forest management plan. 

Bardwell Farm’s 237 acres sits atop ambling hills of hay fields and woodland fenced here and there.  The eponymous Orchard Road, little more than two ruts running up the hillside, and a lone ancient apple tree at the peak, suggest one of the farm’s former products.  At times the road is gated allowing no access, however, as I trudged up the hill for several winter sunrises, I saw snow shoe and cross-country ski tracks (with accompanying pole poke-holes straddling them), dog and horse tracks and evidence of some brave four-wheel drive truck attempting the meagre but somewhat steep and snow-covered summit.  From much of that summit, one is afforded a vista of the surrounding hills.  I was more drawn, however, to the textures of the fields, the trees and fence lines and, when there at the right time, the backdropping cloud cover, well-lit by the morning sun, that produced the visual relationships I framed into my compositions.  One could hardly ignore, as well, the solitary, gnarled apple tree, spreading its low branches against the sky from its perch on the summit.  And while it was that tree that drew me time and again to the area, I found more fully formed arrowheads and handwrought relics, so to speak, for my compositions among the furrows and fields of Bardwell Farm.

Bardwell is subject to a Conservation Restriction (CR), a legally enforceable agreement that ensures that the land have the “permanent protection of specific conservation values while permitting limited land uses consistent with the protection of [those] conservation values.”  CRs do not provide merely temporary respite from development and unfettered use.  Rather, they provide permanent restrictions as to use that require governmental dispensation from the program for the land to be used beyond the CR’s restrictions and, only then, “in the public interest.”  Foxbard, on the other hand, includes several noncontiguous parcels many of which are subject to an Agricultural Preservation Restriction (APR) program overseen by the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources.  According to the MDAR website, the program “helps to preserve agricultural land to keep valuable farmland soil from being built on by development companies for non-agricultural purposes that could be detrimental to the environment.” 

The images of Foxbard and Bardwell, cultivated from the earth of my efforts for over a year to date, are but a chapter in the story of those places, a short chapter at that.  But one that matters in my estimation, perhaps as much as Darrell’s mapped out finds in those sweetcorn fields those years ago.  Human interaction has already changed Foxbard and Bardwell from when I began making images there.  Many of the fence posts that figure so prominently in many of my Foxbard compositions have been removed, as has a portion of the gate seen behind the lone apple tree atop the summit of Bardwell’s rolling fields.   In fact, my vantage point atop the Foxbard’s hilltop crag is now surrounded by an electrified fence penning in cattle grazing on grasses I once trod over.  But these farms’ story has been told in my images—or a bit if it, anyway.  And with that story a foundation for meaning has been laid from the context provided by my images, much like a bit of the story of the pre-colonial people told through Darrell’s potsherding. 

For me, it is programs like APRs and CRs, along with other public and private land trusts, and the officials and trustees that administer them and the landowners that embrace them that, to me, give the best chance at responsible development in the region while maintaining large tracts of forests and farmland in an idyllic state—land that cannot be maintained as working farms or responsibly logged in the current economy but remains protected from profit-driven development.  And in so doing, should the plow ever cut again these hilltop farms, and a gentle rain falls to wash the upturned shingle, some future potsherder, while likely lacking Darrell’s full spectrum of talents and knowledge, may walk the furrows looking for an arrowhead and come back with a lifelong passion like Darrell’s: to find, show, tell, preserve and conserve.  Or, like me, by other means, to try to tell a bit of the story of a place—to contextualize it.

A Rare Find

Alas, for all my time in the fields of southeastern Massachusetts with Darrel, potsherding for hidden artefacts, I found only a handful of broken points and worked shards to add to his collection, to that story.  In those cornfields with Darrell I never experienced the exhilaration he felt when finding a fully formed arrowhead or other implement.  But, those feelings of elation that come with true discovery of an ancient artefact did come my way on a backwoods, gravel fire-road in central Vermont.  It was a moment I will never forget.  Meandering back to our campsite with some friends, I had my eyes downcast on the rocky dirt road more from habit than hope.  My eyes browsed over countless stones on the gravelly path, grazing half buried pebbles and rocks impersonating that they were hand worked implements of a forgotten time, until my eyes landed upon one that was not lying, not an imposter.  And then another.  And another.  Even now, twenty-five plus years later, I feel echoes of the exhilaration and the buoyant joy that filled and lifted me as I knelt to inspect what turned out to be a beautifully rendered stone axe head, a celt and a worked, rounded stone tool, all within inches of each other on that shady lane on the slopes of the Green Mountains.  The same song fills me now—whether it’s looking through my viewfinder, or my computer monitor later on, or with my gear stowed at the ready—when I no longer see dirt covered imposters among the freshly plowed furrows of the landscape, but rather the wrought gems, hidden and unseen before becoming fully formed artefacts for my lens to capture. 

—Doug Butler

A version of this essay appeared in On Landscape on January 26, 2022.