The Steve Cruikshank Memorial Conservation Easement Closes a Gap
By Al Jaeger

As Steve and Irene Cruikshank grew up in coastal Rockingham County, they saw the disappearance of woodlots separating neighborhoods, fields for back-lot baseball, and other wild and semi-wild places. So when Steve and Irene bought their land in Deerfield in 1989, they always planned to place it under permanent protection. Steve was a carpenter and Irene assisted as they built their fine handmade post and beam house, brick hearth for the wood stove, and solar disc and batteries for electricity. The lands abutting three sides, altogether six private woodlots totaling almost 400 acres, comprise the Great Brook Corridor protected with conservation easements.

Steve and Irene's land was the "missing tooth" for the brook, for protection and movement of wildlife, and for a four-mile footpath open to the public from HarveyRoad to Coffeetown Road. Two brooks from the western boundary of the Cruikshank land flow down to GreatBrook. One of them passes through mature mixed hardwoods and over stones and roots creating small ledgy waterfalls. It drops into a black pool surrounding a mossy boulder where Irene often sits thinking of Steve who died 3 ½ years ago at 51, still full of dreams. Both streams create sunny marshes as they enter Great Brook creating an isolated paradise of cattails, red-winged blackbirds and dragonflies now completely surrounded by protected land.

Stunning granite outcrops cross the land in east-west ridges sheltering the two little streams and forcing dramatic turns of Great Brook as it emerges from forest to wide marshes. One outcrop looms 90 feet above the south bank of one of the streams.

Irene owns 30 acres of extra-ordinary land. Her home is at the southern tip and her donated conservation easement on the remaining 26.4 acres to be held by Bear-Paw, is no longer "the missing tooth" in the Great Brook Corridor. The Town of Deerfield will contribute $3,500 to the transaction costs associated with the project and will hold an executory interest in the easement. Irene says, "Steve loved wild places. For recreation he always went to somewhere as untouched as possible. Protecting our own wild and natural land is a perfect tribute to his memory."