Burbank Woods Preserve

Location: 25-75 Coffeetown Road, Deerfield NH 03037

Parking: Small dirt lot with room for 2-3 cars. This is a designated parking lot but is not plowed in winter.

Trails

The Great Brook Trail runs between Coffeetown and Harvey Roads in Deerfield. It passes through Burbank Woods Preserve, several privately owned properties, and Deerfield's newest Town Forest.
Please respect the landowners who have opened their property to the public by keeping your dogs on leash, taking out everything you brought in, and using the property only as explicitly allowed.

History

In 1985, Dr. Jack & Mrs. Helen Burbank drove up Al Jaeger's driveway with a canoe strapped to the roof of their car. They were in their 60s, newly retired and with no plans to slow down. They owned a piece of land down the road, they told him, and asked to take a walk out to the old cemetery they knew was on his property. It held members of Dr. Burbank's family, long buried. Al, always happy to welcome new friends and neighbors to join him for a walk, led the way. Afterwards Al invited the Burbanks to canoe in his pond.

"They were so nice- such wonderful people," Al reminisced.

The friendship they struck up was based around a mutual love of that quiet little corner of Deerfield, where Al has lived for several decades and where the Burbank family has owned land for over a century. Although Jack and Helen lived in Vermont, they had strong family ties to the area and were deeply invested in seeing it preserved. They worked with the USDA's Land and Community Investment Program (LCIP) to put a conservation easement on their land, and encouraged their neighbors to do the same.

After Jack & Helen passed away their children agreed that, in keeping with their parents' values, they would gift the land to an organization that would permanently conserve and protect it, and in 2017 Burbank Woods became a Bear-Paw Preserve.

Habitat & Wildlife

Although the predominant habitat type is Appalachian oak-pine with small stands of hemlock-hardwood-pine mixed in throughout the forest, nearly half of the largest parcel is a wet meadow, which is currently inundated with water and acting as a beaver pond. As the seasons and water level change, different wetland plant communities are visible in different locations.