The Legacy of Stephen Collins 

It was 1968 when Marion Jenkins told Town Clerk Sidney Svirsky that she wanted to protect her 25-acre Bethany woodland, on which her family’s summer cabin stood, in its natural condition and as a haven for wildlife.  The Town Clerk said that the town could not do that, but he passed her wish on to Stephen Collins, Chairman of the Conservation Commission and Professor of Biological Sciences at SCSU. 

Having heard of the fledgling land trust movement, Steve enlisted the aid of attorney William Simon and landowner Elizabeth Mendell to incorporate the Bethany Conservation Trust, Inc. (now the Bethany Land Trust, Inc.).  In the words of the incorporators inviting residents to the first meeting of the land trust: “… people have recognized the need to reserve and safeguard the natural assets of their landscape.  Trusts open their lands to the public for uses which do not destroy or impair such areas.  Trusts do not take land away from people, but give land to people to enjoy and assure its perpetuity in an undisturbed state.”  

                                                                                                                                                                 

That same year, Marion Jenkins’ property, dedicated as the Ida Carrington Lowell preserve in honor of her mother, became the first preserve the Land Trust received.  Later, Elisabeth Mendell donated the second piece of land to the Trust, 125 acres in northern Bethany now known as Mendell’s Folly. 

Following a Land Trust walk on the Ida Carrington Lowell Preserve on a cool October day in 1981, Stephen Collins wrote to Marion Jenkins:

            The land endures. It becomes more valuable with every passing year.  And the wisdom of saving land now while the opportunity still exists is good sense.  Your gift of land was the very first—indeed, the cause of the Bethany Conservation Trust.  Every year in my Environmental Biology and Conservation course, and each semester, I tell my class about how you and I, sight unseen, had 20-minute telephone conversation and began to explore your wish to set aside land and keep it in its natural state for all those today and all those who follow us to enjoy.  And I tell them that there are generous people out there who love the land and would like it to remain as natural as possible with just natural forces holding sway.  That is how your land has been managed.  The trees have not been cut, but allowed to fall and rot and return to soil, serving the grouse with drumming logs and the visitors with natural benches.

            I told the group what you told me— your great enjoyments in life were your happy marriage and your setting up of a “forever-wild” tract of land in Bethany. .. 

Fifty-five years after that first fateful conversation, the Bethany Land Trust continues to preserve our natural lands for the benefit of future generations, as one of the oldest land trusts in the nation.

After the establishment of the Bethany Land Trust in 1968, Stephen Collins, Bethany resident and Professor of Biological Sciences at SCSU, set his sights on a larger landscape, West Rock Ridge. What grew in the imagination of Mr. Collins along with Peter Cooper, a conservationist lawyer, and Dr. William Doheny of Hamden was the possibility of creating a regional park. 

At that time, the City of New Haven had its own West Rock Park, with an access road, Baldwin Parkway, constructed by the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) along the ridge in the 1930’s.  The idea for the expanded regional park had the four abutting towns of New Haven, Woodbridge, Bethany and Hamden coming together to form a larger entity. This larger park would include not only lands already protected but also a “Conservation Area” out beyond the existing preserved lands in each community.

The three conspirators used the 1961 Cape Cod National Seashore legislation, which encompassed both private and public lands, as inspiration for preservation of West Rock Ridge. They drafted legislation that included a mechanism to create a conservation area beyond the existing park’s boundaries. The draft also established a reviewing committee with representatives from the four different communities to advise on which properties to purchase for the park.  

The legislation establishing the new regional park passed.  However, the chief of the State Park Department recommended that then Gov. Ella Grasso veto it, which she did. It was felt that a local grass roots proposal would interfere with the usual protocol that ideas for new parks were generated by bureaucrats from the top down.  The creation of a local level advisory committee was going to be an enormous bother and interference with the sovereign immunity of the State.

Because Steve and Bill and Peter were sufficiently naïve young “whippersnappers” and did not know any better, they thought Ella Grasso’s veto was an outrage.  So, they plunged into the political process, buttonholed legislative supporters, and to everyone’s amazement generated enough support so that the legislature overrode the veto in 1975. Thus, the small New Haven West Rock Park became over time the four-town West Rock Ridge State Park of now almost 1700 acres.

The park is the second largest in Connecticut, has 21 miles of blazed trails, and has the second highest concentration of rare and endangered species of any park in the state.  For more information about the West Rock Ridge State Park including hiking trails, visit the West Rock Ridge Park Association website at: https://westrockpark.wordpress.com/home/

The Stephen Collins Memorial located in the Niederman/Sizer Field on Sperry Road has a bench facing east toward one of Stephen Collins’s legacies, the West Rock Ridge State Park.