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LEGENDS OF TRAIL WOOD by Max H. Peters
Photos by Skip Broom

Trail Wood is an Audubon Society sanctuary in Hampton. This 160-acre farm includes a house that was built in 1806 and was formerly the home of naturalist Edwin Way Teale and his wife Nellie. They lived herebeginning in 1959 and deeded the place to the Audubon Society on Nellie’s death in 1993.

The farm is remarkable for its size, containing a wide variety of environments within its acreage. Timberlands, meadows, swamps, a pond, and brush lands surrounding an old Colonial-era road create a home for endless mammals up to the size of a deer, numberless plants and insects,and five hundred birds—Teale counted them—throughout the year.But natural richness alone doesn’t hint at the magic of Trail Wood.
To experience the entire scope of this place you need to hike the trails, which are open during the Covid pandemic, (subject to social distancing restrictions), as well as read Edwin Way Teale’s 1974 book, A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm. In this book Teale, with Nellie at his side, takes the reader on a journey of living close to the land, sharing not only their expert knowledge of all things wild, but also what they learned from the people who lived around them and what they discovered about the history of the area, going back to the time of the Revolution. The book is generally available from Amazon and other online sellers.

The house at Trail Wood was built in 1806.

Edwin Way Teale built this Summer House for his wife, Nellie, who enjoyed many hours there observing birds and other wildlife around Little Beaver Pond. In 2005 Joel Szarkowicz and other members of Boy Scout Troop 25 in Pomfret, CT made improvements to the Summer House as an Eagle Scout Service Project.

Edwin Way Teale wrote many books for the general market. He is best known for the four books called The American Seasons, including Wandering through Winter, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1966. I was introduced to him when I found a used paperback of A Naturalist Buys an Old Farmin 1978. In the late 1980s, when the leaves were just beginning to change to red and gold, I found myself in Hampton, turned in curiosity down Kenyon Road, then drove up to the white Colonial house that had taken such a large place in my imagination. I parked in front and knocked on the front door, which was answered by Nellie, looking just asjaunty as in the photos of her in the book. When I talked with enthusiasm about reading Edwin’s books, she invited me into the kitchen where we sat for several hours while she reviewed with me some of the correspondence she had been working on that afternoon with their friends. When I knocked on the door, she had been finishing a letter to Ann Zwinger, who had been working on the book A Conscious Stillness:Two Naturalists on Thoreau’s Rivers. Teale died in 1980. The book was finished from Edwin’s notes and was published in 1982. Nellie told me about some special places she thought I like to see on the farm, including Edwin’s writing cabin on the pond. I let her go back to her correspondence after agreeing to visit her again. I felt like I’d made a new friend. Edwin had written of her that her motto was “Go Slow and See More.” All through the wildflower season, Edwin wrote, she went afield accompanied by a pocket magnifying glass, through which she’d find tiny designs in plant leaves and flowers, minute detail “unsuspected features of even the most diminutive of the blooms expanding before our eyes.”

Edwin Way Teale's writing cabin at Trail Wood.

The rest of the afternoon I spent wandering the farm alone, visiting the writing cabin, watching the muskrats swimming across the pond, walking across the meadow called “Starfield,” and following the “The Old Woods Road” through the swamp, where I watched some redheaded woodpeckers hammer away at an old dead pine. Even in the depth of winter, Edwin and Nellie could walk out with three feet of snow on the ground and lose themselves in wild creatures of types and sizes, from hawks to tiny insects that somehow made their homes in the bark of trees or on the bare limbs of bushes that lay half buried in the snow. “If you wondered if this life’s original sweetness did not wear away as time went on,” Edwin wrote, “if this life did not become more tame and dull with closer acquaintance, I have news, and the news is good. After a decade and a half, this life is still as satisfying, still as near the heart’s desire, the last minute as life as the first. Our acres remain filled with freshness and surprise as though we were visitors, newcomers rather than longtime owners of the lands.”
The Teale’s feel for the landscape extended to the stories they heard from their neighbors. “A strange thing happened, some years ago, on a farm here in northeastern Connecticut,” Edwin wrote. “Among a herd of young steers in one of Lou Chatey’s pastures in Ashford, one, light gray, almost silvery in color, was outstandingly beautiful. It alone, among all the animals in the field, seemed attracted by wildflowers. Every day it would spend part of its time carrying flowers about in its mouth without eating them. Often it would be engaged in this manner for half an hour at a time. On some occasions, it would lay down the flowers, eat grass for a while, then pick them up again and carry them about as before. How can we explain its singular behavior? What was the source of its special interest in field flowers? This is the only instance of the kind that I have encountered.”
In A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, Teale devotes a part of a chapter to a local naturalist, Annie Edmond; he and Nellie became friends with when she was past ninety and blind. By feel and smell, Annie Edmond could identify wildflowers brought to her; by hearing, she could identify hundreds of birds.