Town #53 Hampton

Thursday, September 17, 2009
Trail Wood, Audubon Society's Edwin Way Teale Memorial Sanctuary

Hampton has an excellent town website but they claim no interesting things to see. We pulled a first and visited the town hall to speak with the Town Clerk. She laughed at the idea that we were looking for “something interesting in her little town of 1900 people” but when we gave her the “Diana’s Pool” idea, she promptly came up with the Connecticut Audubon Society’s Trail Wood, also known as the Edwin Way Teale Memorial Sanctuary. She also mentioned Pine Acres Lake and Hampton Reservoir, but the latter two will have to wait for another day.

We were not familiar with Teale. Here is a Wikipedia excerpt about him:
"Edwin Way Teale (June 2, 1899-October 18, 1980) was an American naturalist, photographer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Teale's works serve as primary source material documenting environmental conditions across North America from 1930-1980. He is perhaps best known for his series The American Seasons, four books documenting over 75,000 miles (121,000 km) of automobile travel across North America following the changing seasons."

We signed in at the unmanned Visitor’s Center, just past the house in which Teale and his wife Ellie lived, looked over various educational materials, and studied a map and guide of the grounds and tried to find our way to the suggested trail. After a couple of trials and errors, we found the Veery Trail and we were on our way. We found Hidden Pond, which Teale had excavated from a red maple swamp for his enjoyment as well as his nature studies, and a nearby Summer House, basically a 9-foot square screened gazebo. He would sit there and look over his pond and footbridge at the far end of the pond, a nice relaxing place to meditate. We walked around the pond to the footbridge, then to the Writing Cabin. The cabin was built of logs, but was locked. Teale is said to have written some of his books here. Its dimensions are reportedly the same as Thoreau’s on Walden Pond. We made our way back to the Visitor’s Center, replaced the laminated guides we’d borrowed for the trek, and headed back to the parking lot. Jan spotted a monument built many years ago by one of the workers on the grounds of Teale’s estate. The man realized that monuments seemed to be built for various well known people, but none for the common laborer, so he built one to himself in Monument Field using the indigenous stone that he was hired to clear from the field.

The sanctuary was interesting and there are plenty of documented spots to explore. The trails need a little more maintenance, but we suspected they were let go due to perhaps finances, and the fact it was after Labor Day. We’d like to return and walk some more of the trails.