14 years later, Helene Lund's plaque finds its way home

The farm's view of Mount Everett

We are fairly proud of the fact that at the Resources Council, despite occasional dishevelment in our personal appearances, our filing system is so good that nothing ever gets lost. So how did we manage to misplace a 15-pound bronze memorial plaque for 14 years?

Helene Lund farmed the 177-acre Friendly Flock Farm in Sheffield along Boardman Street for over 40 years. She and her husband raised sheep and had started the magazine The Shepherd. She loved her land and in 1988 she protected it forever with a conservation restriction. To honor Helene, we struck a plaque, reading, in part, "Helene Lund's friends gathered at the Sheffield Grange to honor her as a conservationist and to thank her for her generosity." It was a fun event. And when it was over, the plaque had disappeared.

The question of the plaque's existence became a little shadowy, and it came to attention only when someone in the office noticed a handwritten note in the Lund file that said "What about the Lund plaque?" Well, what about it?

Jim Larkin

The search was on. It could have ended up in someone's house, garage, storage shed, office, basement, attic-or anywhere.

It's not like we hadn't tried to find the plaque. In fact, we even had it for a while, before it slipped through our fingers again. We just couldn't seem to pin it down.

One day, a call came in from the Sheffield Land Trust with the message that the Lund plaque happened to be sitting around over there, and were we looking for it?

Fourteen years of delay is enough. With the good help of Jim Larkin, a Sheffield dairy farmer, and the gracious cooperation of Nadia Stumo, who now owns and manages the land under the name of Hospitable Hen Farm, the plaque will soon be where it's supposed to be, bolted to a very large roadside boulder on the land Helene Lund loved, and preserved.