WESTERLY – The Westerly Land Trust has added to its holdings in the Pawcatuck River Corridor with the purchase of six riverfront acres from Rosemarie and Karl Anderson for $300,000, according to Harvey C. Perry II, the trust’s president.
The forested property – next to the house where the siblings grew up – stretches from Potter Hill Road down to a “small, sandy beach area,” Perry told Providence Business News in an e-mail interview today. The riverfront beach can be reached from the road via a footpath about 100 yards long. The trust plans to install signs marking the location, probably by the end of May.
The Andersons, who now live out of state, “both needed to sell the property to fund their retirement plans,” Perry said, confirming a report this morning in New London’s The Day. The siblings didn’t want to see the property subdivided, so they gave the Land Trust a chance to bid.
“We own it, and everybody’s happy,” Perry told The Day. The trust closed on the property Feb. 28, he added in comments to the PBN.
The money comes from three grants – from the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, received the Forrest and Frances Lattner Foundation and the Bafflin Foundation – that were “received over a period of a year, with the DEM grant arriving in February,” Perry said.
The property will be named the Anderson Preserve and will be opened to the public. “It does not adjoin any other Westerly Land Trust property, but it is near other such properties,” Perry told PBN. “It is the 10th parcel we have acquired along the river.”
Its purchase was part of the trust’s Pawcatuck River Corridor Initiative, which aims to protect scenic recreation sites as well the river and underlying aquifer that provide drinking water for most of Westerly and Pawcatuck, Conn.
The trust now owns 1,000 acres in Westerly, including more than 700 riverfront acres.
It is currently working to acquire another 2.5-acre riverfront parcel, Perry said. “We are working on raising money to pay for the $75K purchase price and other acquisition costs. Although smaller than most of our projects, it has a high priority because our anticipated management of the site will reduce the nitrogen loading of the Pawcatuck River and the Little Narragansett Estuary,” he said.
In addition, “we are also engaged in a project to adaptively re-use certain commercial properties in downtown Westerly, to contribute to the social and economic vitality of the downtown area,” Perry said.
The Westerly Land Trust owns more than 1,000 acres in Westerly, including more than 700 acres along the Pawcatuck River. To learn more about its Pawcatuck River Corridor Initiative and other conservation projects, visit WesterlyLandTrust.org.
