104 years later, owners conserve
Mt. Washington gem

Bash Bish Brook, which turns into the state’s highest waterfall downstream, is the natural centerpiece of the Club Grounds property

In 1893, Gustav Walter went in with Leonard Hosford to establish the Berkshire Hills Park Association, an entity formed to hold some 613 acres in the Town of Mount Washington. The partners agreed to sell a limited number of shares in the property, each of which would allow the purchaser to construct a single cottage and to enjoy the property according to the “uses for which a gentleman’s summer or country residence and grounds are used.”

Bobbie Hallig

On December 31, 2007, Walter’s granddaughter Sue Crowell and four of his great-grandchildren were part of a remarkable group helping to ensure that future “gentlemen” would leave the land, now known as the Berkshire Club Grounds, just as Gustav Walter first saw it – give or take 114 years of unimpeded forest recovery.

Co-owner Bobbie Hallig is a relative newcomer to the Club Grounds, having only arrived on the scene in 1971. She began thinking about a conservation destiny for the property in the 1990s, and in 2005, Sue Crowell joined Hallig in putting her shoulder behind the idea.

Crowell and Hallig, together with Sue’s husband Wally, her sons James and Andy, her nieces Wendy Sanchez and Marcia Inscore, and siblings Colin and Sheila Moran (their dad, Robert Moran, bought a share in 1956), donated a conservation restriction over the property to BNRC on the last day of 2007.

Wally and Sue Crowell

Most spectacularly defined by the roaring chasm of Bash Bish Brook as it flows toward Massachusetts’ highest waterfall downstream, the property is notable for stately forests, left untouched since the Copake Iron Works stopped stripping the woods for charcoal in the late 1800s.

Towering hemlocks and imposing hardwoods dominate the steep and wild slopes above the brook. A small pocket of old-growth forest clings to a high northern slope.

Adjacent to the 4,170 acre Mount Washington State Forest and to 141 acres newly placed under conservation restrictions held by The Nature Conservancy, the Club Grounds CR represents a major expansion of protected watershed and wildlife habitat in one of the state’s most ecologically significant areas.

Hallig reminded us more than once that her friend Nancy Smith, an eminent conservationist and founder of the Sweet Water Trust, had inspired her with the observation that, “land is much too important to be left to your children.”

Perhaps so, in many cases, but if Gustav Walter were alive today, he might point out with some justification that his descendants—gentlemen and gentlewomen all—had proven more than equal to the challenge of caring for this special corner of the Berkshires.

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