This 2009 article describes a joint federal-community partnership to restore an important marsh destroyed over 80 years ago by a private airport. REVITALIZATION readers familiar with the situation are invited use the Comments section below to updated the rest of us on the current health of the marsh.
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From 1928 until his death in 1936, multimillionaire Col. Edward H. R. Green‘s private airport at Round Hill (Massachusetts) was one of the finest in the country, with finely manicured grass runways and flood lights and huge neon tubes atop the mansion that served as a beacon to fliers such as Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, and William Randolph Hearst Jr., all of whom landed there.
But to build the airport, the colonel used more than 170,000 cubic yards of topsoil from local farms and sand pumped from Buzzards Bay to fill-in a natural saltwater marsh for his runways.
And now more than 80 years later, Dartmouth and other agencies are planning to use federal Superfund money to recreate the portion of the former 15-acre, salt marsh on town property that Green destroyed.
Michael O’Reilly, Dartmouth’s environmental affairs coordinator, anticipates receiving final approval from the New Bedford Harbor Trustee Council, which oversees the harbor superfund money, for the permitting and construction in February or March of next year. They are hopeful of starting construction next year or the beginning of 2011.
“We’re really returning the marsh to its former condition from scratch,” he said.
The town is partnering with several agencies — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the state Wetlands Restoration program, and the Coalition for Buzzards Bay — on the $2.3 million project.