The Montgomery Township Committee on October 6th
approved the acquisition of two new properties for open space preservation, totaling 50 acres. One property is located in northern Montgomery and the other in the southern part of town.
"Adding these 50 acres to Montgomery's open space portfolio provides significant benefits to the township. Both of these properties add to adjoining open space and our greenways and provide valuable natural and recreational resources for our residents to enjoy. We are excited to have taken this opportunity to preserve these properties!" said Montgomery Mayor Patricia Graham.
The southern property is 36 acres of woodland on Cherry Hill Road which would provide new access to the existing 400+ acre Cherry Brook Preserve. This acquisition will provide a valuable trailhead/access to the southern part of the Preserve, which has five miles of hiking and biking pathways for public use. Preserving this piece also protects the contiguous network of preserved forest, providing valuable breeding and stop-over habitat, particularly for Neotropical birds.
The property owner had sought approval from the Township Planning Board to build five residential lots. At the time of the Planning Board hearing, the Township Open Space Committee expressed interested in seeing the property preserved - it has long been a targeted property on the Township's Conservation Plan.
The Township will purchase the property using a combination of funds from NJDEP Green Acres funds, Township Open Space Trust Fund, donations made by neighbors, and compensation paid by Williams/Transco to offset land disturbance during the recent pipeline construction project. The purchase price of the land is $2 million.
The northern property is 13.5 acres of woodland on Broadway and Rt. 601 and overlooks the Sourland Mountains. Known as the Dix Skillman / Hillmont tract, it is adjacent to 800 acres of open space including the Broadway fields & McKnight complex and Lubas Field. It is also very close to Somerset County open space, including the Sourland Mountain Preserve & County lands formerly owned by Carrier Clinic. This acquisition preserves forest habitat and wetlands and also providing for possible future expansion of recreational facilities in the vicinity.
While it remains vacant land, this property has an interesting history. This land is a conglomerate of a large number of small residential building lots (20 ft. x 100 ft.) created on paper in the late nineteenth century by land owner Charles H. Cook. Cook was a pottery manufacturer from Trenton who promoted Belle Mead as a factory town with healthy country air for the working class. Manufacturing plants were to be built along the railroad on Reading Blvd. Promoters ran free excursion trains from the city to convince potential factory workers to buy the nearby lots on paper streets on time-payment plans for a few dollars down. Some factories were built, but never on a large scale. One better-known example was Belle Mead Sweets, makers of fine chocolates, which left in 1904. Necessary residential improvements were never built for the factory worker neighborhood and almost all buyers lost their lots to tax foreclosure in the Great Depression.
Over many years, Attorney Dix Skillman set about buying up many of the undeveloped individual lots to rejoin them. His widow, Virginia Skillman, recently agreed to sell the multitude of lots to Montgomery for preservation. The 'paper road' rights-of-way visible on tax maps will be vacated.
The Dix Skillman / Hillmont property will be purchased using funds from Township Open Space Trust Fund and NJDEP Green Acres Program. The purchase price is $382,500.
Asked about these two open space acquisitions, Deputy Mayor and Open Space Liaison Ed Trzaska commented:
"We are thrilled to preserve another 50 acres in town. This new open space adds to our 400-acre Cherry Hill Preserve and the 800 acres of protected land surrounding Lubas Park. One of our core governing principles is to protect Montgomery's rural character. Over the past several years, we have preserved over 600 acres of additional open space, including 170 acres in 2016 alone."
It is anticipated that these land purchases will be completed by early 2017.
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