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Finding Gibbs Swamp

Talus slope
The talus slope above Gibbs Swamp. Photos by John Berg/The Nature Conservancy.

“Don’t even try it,” my friend said, chuckling and shaking his head slowly. “That’s Gibbs Swamp. People have lost horses in there.”

It had been a year since he sold his land to our local land trust – a 40-acre addition to a preserve called the Pocasset Ridge Conservation Area, a patchwork quilt of woodlots acquired over the course of many years by three separate environmental agencies that now cooperatively manage it. I was collecting data for the baseline documentation on the new addition when I saw my friend having breakfast at a local eatery and sat down beside him to ask some questions. I had been wondering about shortcutting through a wetland on his former property because getting to it is quite a bushwhack from the preserve trailhead.

I had never heard of a Gibbs Swamp, much less his somber warning. Then several days later, in reviewing the property survey I saw a note: “…the north half of the 1864 division of the Gibbs Lot in book 23 page 24.” I mentally filed that away as an interesting historical link, and figured the word “swamp” probably referred to Quaket Creek, a drainage corridor crossing several properties below Pocasset Ridge.

Twenty years ago, a study by The Nature Conservancy documented the Ridge’s important interior habitat, a lot of oak barren and huckleberry thicket but with invasive-free natural integrity. Historic disturbance seemed to be limited to low-level fuel wood extraction with no evidence of ecosystem-altering, industrial clear-cutting. With little more than deer paths in its interior, the Ridge is about as close to a wilderness as one will find in coastal southern New England, and it became a conservation priority.

The large donut-hole of green on Google maps right in the middle of suburbia is quite a historical irony because of its location in one of the first subdivisions of colonial America. Following King Philip’s War, when the Pocasset Wampanoags had been driven from their traditional land along the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, Plymouth Colony governors authorized the “first division” of the land in 1681. This included 30 great lots and a 132-foot-wide Eight Rod Way – the colonial version of a superhighway. This “proprietor’s way” still zigzags through the conservation area and appears on current town plat maps.

“And the rest is history” would apply here if the normal pattern of New England land use had followed: forest clearing, farming, abandonment, and then modern development. Why that never happened is apparent on one’s first hike into the Pocasset Ridge Conservation Area. The ice age was unkind to it, leaving a terrain littered with glacial debris – outcrops, boulder fields, and cliffs interspersed among wetlands and nutrient-poor soils. A label of the area on an 1819 Army Corps of Engineers map is telling: “Impenetrable Forest.”

A nightmare for developers can be a conservationist’s dream, so it became an ecological preserve with hundreds of acres of trackless woods and wildly varying microclimates. Rugged terrain, multiple natural communities, and interesting archeology provide ongoing temptation for its stewards to get away from desks in favor of fieldwork. This is exactly what a colleague and I were doing on a particularly lovely spring morning when we met for some routine forest monitoring in Pocasset Ridge.

One objective of the day was to show him an abandoned “squatter” homesite. Several of these survive, hidden away by design in the forest interior. They are not identified on old maps that depict individual homesites, nor are they documented in town land records. They are also not the familiar remains of “Yankee farms” still scattered among New England forests, with their sturdy foundations and central chimneys. These are complexes of rude stone walls, sometimes including a dug well or a small cellar hole that could have been under a modest dwelling.

Gibbs Swamp
Hikers looking out over Gibbs Swamp from the top of the cliff.

After years of wandering around these sites, hearing local lore and piecing together historical references to similar sites, I believe they tell the story of Black people finding refuge, and surviving where nobody would challenge them. Runaway slaves or freedmen could carve out a subsistence living with a small garden and some goats where English land “improvement” was unthinkable. Town council records in the 1880s recorded complaints of Black “squatters” on Eight Rod Way and commissioned a survey to address the issue. Next door in Massachusetts there was an entire Black village of this type, called Dartmouth Ridge, and Henry David Thoreau wrote about Blacks living in the woods near his cabin at Walden Pond.

Remarkably, some of the homesites in the conservation area are located precisely on Eight Rod Way, that being public land where there would be less legal basis for eviction. How did these residents know the exact boundaries, as it had never been used as a public way? Black laborers would have done the hard labor for surveyors, clearing site-lines and schlepping stone for marking bounds, so that information would have found its way into the Black community.

There is another interesting feature on the preserve that I wanted my colleague to see, and getting to it required circling around a disjunct wetland and some grunt-worthy huffing up a rise on its backside. Using my best Daniel Boone techniques – navigating by terrain and sun angle – we made our way to remnants of a more remote past: the geological birth of Pocasset Ridge.

Footprints of the last glacier are common throughout Narragansett Bay: erratics, exposed bedrock, and this area’s signature rock form, puddingstone. But this two-acre deposition is a massive pile of boulders, and unique in my experience. It evokes an angry mythological giant, casting boulders onto the door of Hades to prevent the escape of Penthos. On this sunny spring morning we crawl around the mega-rubble, marveling at forces at work 15,000 years ago, and think perhaps the Laurentide ice sheet really was a mile thick.

The day was getting on, with its main objectives checked off, so we set out toward a 90-foot cliff overlooking the Quaket Creek wetland where a spur trail would get us back to the trailhead. I knew the direction and how to get there, so I put away my topo map as we began punching through this last bushwhacking leg. Idle conversation can get one in trouble where there are no trails, and sure enough, downslope from the boulder field things suddenly looked unfamiliar. Unexpected standing water appeared in front of us as we clambered over some low outcrops then down into a small clearing where – time seemed to stop. Before our eyes was a natural amphitheater that begged for quietude. We complied, standing transfixed by the scene.

Towering oaks thrust skyward into the overstory, waist-high skunk cabbage arched over deep sphagnum on the forest floor, with woven patterns of multilayered vegetation in between. Dead snags, moss-covered nurse logs, and the disheveled woody debris that complete a forest’s circle of life complemented the green tapestry.

My colleague’s career involved many years of tracking through state forests in environmental law enforcement, and I have spent thousands of hours since childhood looking upward into over-stories of magnificent forest ecosystems. But for both of us, this was one of those memorable benchmarks that stitch together one’s life experiences and give it definition. This isolated stand of trees was a glimpse of what a forest becomes when left to find its own equilibrium. It had everything it needed – rich nutrients shed off the Ridge for eons and ample moisture from a wetland. But it also had the gift of human inaccessibility. Even oxen teams would have been challenged to work lumbering operations.

The term “old growth” has lost much of its punch from overuse, and even forest ecologists vary in defining it. I have come to think of it as being in the you-know-it-when-you-see-it category. We saw it that day – a quintessential primal forest, a Wendell Berry moment of being “in the presence of mystery,” two modern men who “had come back under the spell of a primitive awe, wordless and humble.”

We eventually found our way to the cliff and began the haul back to the truck. Later that day I reviewed GPS data to confirm what I had suspected. We had stumbled onto Gibbs Swamp, a few acres of the earth with an obscure human history, but with primal roots connecting to an ancient past.

Discussion *

May 24, 2021

Beautifully written & filled with joyful insights that provide a keyhole view into a local swamp.  That Garry made me want to stumble through to find this place because of his wordsmithing is impressive ❤️  Going to miss seeing you at Coastal Roasters every Saturday, Garry.

Emily McHugh

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