There's a type of American success story that rarely goes viral on social media, rarely gets optioned for a Netflix docuseries, and quietly outlives pretty much all of the other stuff we create: a person gives away land, and then decades later, strangers are still walking on it. That's the entire plot of Martha L. Nickerson's story, and it deserves more attention than it's getting. According to the Attleboro Land Trust's newsletter, Nickerson donated 48 acres of her family's Attleboro, Massachusetts farm to the trust on June 29, 2001, and it's now public land called the Nickerson Walking Woods Preserve, replete with a half-mile inner loop and a full-mile outer loop that anyone can meander on; no membership, no fee, no day pass sold out.
The farm before the fence came down
The land wasn't some untouched wilderness; Nickerson's parents kept cows and chickens there and sold the milk, eggs, and produce locally. The field that once yielded hay and corn is now managed as meadow habitat, and the small pond the family once harvested ice from has become a vernal pool, the same acreage, repurposed from working farmland into a landscape left to find its own equilibrium. Nothing earth-shattering has happened to the landscape itself; it's just a farm that has retained its capacity for self-sustaining existence in a different medium, due to one woman's decision.
