Celebrating our community and natural heritage from Waverly Square to the Waverly Oaks

Belmont and Waltham Massachusetts

Welcome to the Waverley Trail

A Treasured Stand of Trees in an Historic Neighborhood

In the Waverley neighborhood of Belmont, Massachusetts and in the adjacent city of Waltham, there are a number of beautiful and distinguished buildings and landscapes. Among them is an historic resource of international significance: a small but impressive stand of trees, including several large oaks, that grows on a series of steep, short hills rising above Beaver Brook. These trees are protected within the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation’s Beaver Brook Reservation.

Several of these protected trees are very likely the descendants of the remarkable Waverley Oaks – a grove of nearly two dozen very large and ancient white oaks growing on that site which, in the 1890s, inspired the creation of the world’s first land trust (now known as The Trustees of Reservations, or TTOR) as well as the nation’s first public regional park authority (the Metropolitan Park Commission, now part of the Department of Conservation and Recreation, or DCR). The land trust and regional park movements which the Waverley Oaks helped to establish have had global impacts, inspiring the conservation of millions of acres of open space in the United States and internationally, from the Czech Republic to Chile.

A Trail to Celebrate Our Natural and Cultural Heritage

The Waverley Trail, dedicated on Arbor Day 2007 before a large and enthusiastic crowd of young people and adults, is a three-quarter mile interpretive trail that aims to bring alive, for new generations, the remarkable natural and cultural heritage of the Waverley neighborhood, and of the Waverley Oaks which were instrumental in inspiring landmark innovations in the history of the American conservation movement. We invite you to explore the Waverley Trail itself, stretching along Trapelo Road from Waverley Square in Belmont to the Waverley Oaks site in the Beaver Brook Reservation that spans the Belmont-Waltham town line. We also invite you to explore this website, and the Tour of Trail which it offers.

Celebration of Stewardship at the Newly Completed Waverley Trail

On June 18, 2009, at 3 pm, Belmont and Waltham citizens welcomed to Mass Audubon’s Habitat Sanctuary a pair of distinguished guests – Rand Wentworth, national President of the Land Trust Alliance, and DCR Commissioner Richard Sullivan. Sullivan and Wentworth took part in the ceremony marking the completion of the Waverley Trail. The remarks at the ceremony focused on the recognition of past, present and future generations of stewards of Waverley’s natural and cultural heritage.

Such stewards include:

• Historic champions of land conservation in the area, including Judy Record of Belmont, Kit Burstein of Waltham, and Richard Furbush of Waltham

• Present-day stewards represented by: the Belmont Citizens Forum, Hammond Real Estate, Firenze Artisan Gelato and Sorbetto, Paul and Phyl Solomon, and the Berkley family, who are sponsors of the six new interpretive panels that have been added to the Trail; Rene Morin, the remarkable DCR supervisor who has been instrumental in the care of the Beaver Brook Reservation for decades; and Wes Ward of The Trustees of Reservations, Gary Clayton of Mass Audubon, and Anne Paulsen, former Belmont Selectman and State Representative, all of whom have been instrumental in the protection of open space on the adjacent McLean Highlands.

• The next generation of stewards of our natural resources, represented by the Habitat Intergenerational Partners (HIP) that have devoted so much time and energy to eradicating invasive species, as well as other Young Naturalists at Mass Audubon’s nearby Habitat Nature Sanctuary and Education Center.

For more information and media coverage of the 2007 and 2009 celebrations of the Waverley Trail, please see the Resources section of this www.waverleytrail.org website.