As the Trust was building trails on this magnificent property, a second major gift came in. Robert and Ruth Sherman donated 56 acres on Squire Road in memory of Brian Tierney, who had given his life in the Vietnam War. The non-profit organization’s first gift of land came in 1974.

After one director finally “loaned” some land for a nature trail, the Trust began bringing in school children for hikes - a tradition that continues to this day.

The first years of the organization were the hardest, according to those who remember the struggle to get people to understand that Roxbury’s wooded knolls, undulating farmlands and historic sites could be lost forever if not protected. Few could have predicted what this group’s foresight would launch when they signed incorporation papers and began inviting others to join the conservation effort. Birchall was a local dairy farmer and the town’s First Selectman from 1968-1981, Pratt, a nationally known photographer whose family started the Pratt Institute, and Gratwick, a doctor and the retired headmaster of the Horace Mann School in New York.īut the three men had one thing in common: an abiding love of Roxbury’s rural landscape and a deep conviction that something had to be done to preserve the land and the quality of the water in its rivers and brooks. When Charles Pratt, Mitchell Gratwick and Harold Birchall sat around the kitchen table in Pratt’s Roxbury home in 1970, they may have seemed an unlikely trio to found the Roxbury Land Trust.

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