Laughing brook audio

The Laughing Brook Sanctuary in Hamden, Massachusetts was donated by author Thornton Burgess and has grown from 18 acres to 356 acres. It served as a teaching opportunity for students in the Springfield area and had a large education center. The sanctuary was known for its rescued animals and various facilities. However, it began downsizing in the 1990s and suffered damage from floods and an arsonist. Now, only the trails remain active and the Burgess Museum is off-limits. Volunteers have tried to restart teaching programs, but no decisions have been made. The speaker suggests using the natural setting for augmented tagging and online resources to educate visitors. Laughing Brook Sanctuary. The sanctuary is located in Hamden, Massachusetts and is named after a mythical brook found in a children's book by Thornton Burgess, who not only lived there where the sanctuary is located, but who also donated it in his will, in other words his homestead, to the town of Hamden. Now following his death, Laughing Brook has been preserved as a sanctuary beginning in 1966, about one year after his death, and from the original 18 acres, well to about 356 acres over the years after the Massachusetts Audubon Society purchased the property from the town of Hamden. A large education center was eventually built in the 1980s. Now the place thrived for decades, and for those who grew up in the Springfield area, chances are they likely visited the Laughing Brook. Through a city program, all third graders in the Springfield public school system visited the Laughing Brook nature on field trips in the late 1980s, and the same can also be said for many neighboring towns. One could say that the natural eastern New England mountainous habitat provided a great teaching opportunity for the future environmentalists, as well as urban IT youngsters that were getting their very first exposure to nature. But the stories behind the sanctuary really revolves about the author Thornton Burgess. He was born in San Luis, Massachusetts in 1874, part of the Cape Cod, and it's fair to say that his humbling beginnings left him with an intimate appreciation of nature, and that through farming and the harvesting of various native plants, he learned also about the native animals that share his surroundings. Early as a young man, he tried and failed in the business world when he moved to Boston for a couple of years. Then following that, he moved to Springfield in 1894 to work as an editor for the Phelps Publishing Company. His calling was the book world, obviously. Now his author career began first by telling bedtime stories to his orphaned son, whose mother died during childbirth, using stories with animals such as Peter Rabbit, Jimmy Skunk, other animals associated in his own youth back in San Luis. Now a compilation of those such stories was published in 1910 under the title, Old Mother West Wind. He published over 70 books during his lifetime. He also had a radio show on WBZ stationed in Springfield with Nature Talks programming until the 1930s. He's speaking his environmentalist tilt. He purchased the Hamden House, the future museum, in 1925, but only moved in permanently in 1957. His house and the writing studio cabin on the hill, as it were, were already visited by fans of his books even before his death and eventually became museums and incorporated into the sanctuary that the Aldebaran Society would later operate. Now during the 1980s, animal cages were added to the sanctuary where rescued animals from the area were brought in, and those that were unfit for release to the wild were kept for teaching purposes. During its A-Day, the sanctuary had over 30 staff members who worked at various jobs such as teaching, selling in the gift shop, lending books from its library, and caretaking of the animals in facilities. Those facilities included three bridges over the East Brook, also known as the Laughing Brook, an artificial beaver pond, teaching shacks or stations, gazebos, and a wooden pathway or decks over the wetlands. Basically, pressure-treated wood that were built around the wetlands. They also had to keep the footpaths and the trails clear and properly marked. Now the Society began to downsize the operation in the early 1990s, first by closing the caged animal areas and cutting the staff numbers in half. Then in the late 1990s, the teaching jobs were further eliminated and practically stopped after a devastating flood that damaged two of the three bridges, some of the teaching bungalow areas, and even the main building. Now finally, in 2004, an arsonist burned the main building almost to the ground. Now as it happened, the building was not insured and that made it so that it was never rebuilt and the remains were actually demolished soon after. Now since then, besides the two gazebos on the artificial pond's edge, only the trails remain active, along with one bridge over the Brook that connects those trails to the parking lot. The Burgess Museum itself is now off-limits to visitors, as it is the home of the sanctuary caretaker. There are actually four marked trails, foot trails, where no bikes or pets are allowed in the sanctuary. There have been several groups over the years of volunteers that tried to get the Old Dubon Society to restart the teaching programs or at least return the museum to the town, but so far no decisions have been made in those directions. Now my personal interest in the sanctuary is mainly the open trails and the natural habitat. Now I'm not indifferent to the pleas of those that would like to return to the previous conditions, especially invoking the consideration of the intent of the original donor, that the right of wishing for the teaching of children on the site about nature. But I also recognize that there are more ways to accomplish that, in ways that are more budget-friendly for a non-profit organization such as a society. Now one such way is using the natural setting of the sanctuary with augmented tagging and pictorial reviews explaining ecosystems at various points on the trails within the site, all of which do not require in-person interaction, therefore reducing the need for staffing. This format, by the way, could also be repeated in web pages and then be added to the sanctuary's website, which in my opinion currently is not very informative of its richness and flow rate and fountains. Thank you.