Spotlight on the Armstrong Family, Donors of the Armstrong Forest Preserve
This past December, Thomas M. Armstrong and his family donated the 24-acre Armstrong Forest Preserve to Five Rivers Conservation Trust. This preserve, located on Stickney Hill Road in Concord, is our newest conserved property and our second owned property. The family dedicated this forest in memory of Tom’s wife Rachel, and in honor of Tom’s forestry mentors and friends Henry and Birgit Baldwin and Frances and Larry Rathbun.
“We are delighted Five Rivers will own this long-held property of 66 years for public benefit, young and old, a forever forest,” Tom Armstrong writes. “We wish to encourage active public observation, learning, and enjoyment. To be used by neighbors and a much wider circle for the study and wonder of nature—forests in particular—outdoor recreation, and the recharging of our minds, bodies, and spirits.”
Born in Pennsylvania in 1927, Tom studied forestry and agriculture at UNH after receiving a BA at Yale. One of his first jobs was at the Fox Research and Demonstration Forest in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, where he became part of the state’s small and tight-knit forestry and conservation community.
In 1951 Tom married Rachel Franck, living first in Durham and then in Concord. It was after working at Fox State Forest that the couple purchased the “woodlot,” as he called it then, on Stickney Hill Road in 1953. Tom has strong memories of walking through and around this forest, thinning hardwoods, pruning and releasing young pines, and blazing boundaries. With his trusty three-foot blue bucksaw from Fox Forest days, he harvested a total total of 22 cords of wood in 1954 and 1955.
Sarah Thorne, a Five Rivers board member who knows the Armstrongs from their conservation work together, relates a story that Tom told her. When Rachel was in Concord Hospital after delivering their daughter Anne, Tom went to the woodlot for a walk. He picked some mayflowers and brought the bouquet as a gift to his wife and new daughter in the hospital. “Imagine, he remembered that story 60-some years later,” Sarah Thorne notes.
As Tom and Rachel’s family grew, Tom began looking for new opportunities. The family soon found their way to coastal Maine, where Tom’s career was focused on operating the J.D. Deering Lumber Co. in Biddeford, Maine.
An ardent conservationist like her husband, Rachel Armstrong served on the boards of Maine Coast Heritage Trust and Squam Lakes Conservation Society in New Hampshire. Rachel was also the first female board member of the Maine National Bank and served as a leader in many Maine nonprofits.
The four Armstrong children, too, have all volunteered and served on boards for environmental organizations, including Hollis (NH) Land Trust, Maine Nature Conservancy, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust.
Through the years Tom and Rachel continued to watch their 24-acre woodlot in Concord grow and grow, making minimal log harvests to salvage dead and dying trees. The last harvest on the land was in 1980.
Five Rivers is honored to receive this gift of land from the Armstrong family, says Beth McGuinn, Five Rivers’ executive director. “We will care for this land as a natural area, so others can develop a closer relationship to the natural world.”
Many thanks to Anne Armstrong Cram, Sarah Thorne, and Sarah McCraw Crow for their generous contributions to this article.
