Founding
The Briarwood Falls Conservation Trust was chartered in 1962 by a small consortium of families whose adjoining holdings described the upper and middle reaches of the Briarwood basin. The original conveyance, drafted over three successive winters with the counsel of conservation attorneys retained for the purpose, placed the combined parcel — approximately 1,400 acres, including the falls and their associated cataract pool — into an indivisible tenancy to be governed by covenant rather than by market.
The covenant's principal instruction is simple and, in its own way, severe: the land is to be held, observed, and very occasionally restored, but never improved, developed, or opened to the public. Membership in the Trust is not purchased; it is inherited, or occasionally extended by unanimous vote of the standing trustees to individuals who have demonstrated, over a sustained period of association, a temperament suited to the work.
Governance
The Trust is administered by seven trustees who serve staggered nine-year terms. Day-to-day stewardship is the responsibility of a resident warden, presently in the sixteenth year of appointment, and of a small seasonal staff drawn largely from the graduate programs of allied institutions. A standing research compact, renewed biennially, governs the work of visiting ecologists, hydrologists, and field botanists.
All material decisions — the removal of a check dam, the extension of membership, the publication of research findings — require a supermajority of the trustees and are recorded in the minute book, which is held in the archive.
The Parcel
The Briarwood parcel comprises the whole of the Briarwood sub-basin and a narrow buffer of second-growth mixed hardwood forest on the surrounding uplands. The falls themselves — for which the Trust is named, and from which its quiet reputation derives — drop in three stages through a basalt bench at the midpoint of the main stem. The cataract pool below is among the oldest continuously protected features on the parcel; no vessel has been permitted upon it since 1968.
The Reading Public
The Trust publishes its Quarterly Review not as an act of outreach but as a working document for members and for the research community with which we maintain standing relationships. We are grateful for the interest of serious readers who encounter the Review by other routes; we ask only that they understand its private character and the reasons for it.