Borden’s

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Borden’s is home to variety of animals, depending upon which parts of the property you visit!

The field near the parking lot is a great place to look for insects, especially Monarch and Tiger Swallowtail butterflies. You’re most likely to spot these fluttering beauties in summertime.

Venture further into Borden’s along the Streamside Trail and you may be rewarded by catching sight of some of the salamanders that live in and around the property’s seasonal streams. Be careful on the trails in spring when it’s damp so that you avoid squishing a salamander!

Borden’s is great for birding! In the wetlands, look for Mallard Ducks and Solitary Sandpipers. Deeper in the forest, you may hear the sounds of Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers, Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Downy Woodpeckers, or Hairy Woodpeckers hammering away at trees for food. This site is also home to Nuthatches, Gnatcatchers, and several varieties of Warblers (Black-and-white, Cape May, Blackburnian, Black-throated Blue, Yellow-rumped, and Black-throated Green).

The fields at Borden’s are home to two important species – Milkweed and Joe Pye Weed. Milkweed is the only food source for Monarch caterpillars, whose populations have declined by over 90% in the past few decades. Joe Pye Weed is named for Joseph Shauquethqueat Pye, an 18th century Mohican Nation leader who is said to have used his namesake plant to successfully combat a typhoid epidemic among his settler neighbors.

Further into the forest, you may find other important plants and trees. The bark of the Witch Hazel shrub is made into a tea and used by the Mohican people to treat a variety of issues, and it’s a common ingredient in natural beauty products. Sugar Maples have been tapped for centuries – the words used to describe sugar and sap are taken from Dutch and English, suggesting that this began around the time of colonization.

Venture up the Tamarack Trail to the steeper parts of the properties, and you’ll find a forest that’s mostly Maples and Oaks. In the Munsee language, the word for the White Oak group is “pakaxkiimiinzhuy,” which describes the acorns as those preferred for food. The Red Oak group is called “wiisahkakw” or ‘bitter creels,’ suggesting they are not preferred for food, but for fiber. The presence of white oak trees is almost certainly due to centuries of prescribed burns by the Mohican People to maintain their hunting grounds and to clean farm fields nearby.

In the springtime, you may spot spring ephemeral (short-lived) flowers like Trout Lily and Jack-in-the-pulpit along the Streamside Trail. These flowers sprout up from the soil and disappear before the trees have fully grown their leaves, taking advantage of early-season sunshine.

The forested portion of the Borden’s property is located between several fertile floodplains along the Kline Kill, Indian Brook, and portions of the Stony Kill that were likely farmed by the Mohicans. The dozens of plants in the wetland area of the property would have provided the Mohicans with important sources of food, fiber, and medicine.

By the first half of the 18th century, the Van Rensselaer family claimed much of the upper Kinderhook Creek watershed and the upper Green River watershed as within their Lower Manor. The tract of land they claimed was large, spanning several counties all the way to the border with Massachusetts. They, and other Dutch patroons, relied on the labor of indentured people and enslaved Africans to manage these large tracts of land. Ships from the West India Company used the Hudson River as a way to transport enslaved peoples. Once manumitted, those original Black families continued to live, work, and create a vibrant community that survives to this day.

The Van Rensselaer land claim was hotly contested by the nearby Mohican descendants of the original sellers. They rightfully believed that the boundaries had been grossly exaggerated by the Van Rensselaers. The Mohican people were subject to genocide, coerced into assimilation, and forcibly removed from their homelands to what is now known as Wisconsin. They continue to retain their unbroken status as a Sovereign Native Nation. Despite removal, they continue to hold relationships with their homelands and settler communities.

“Borden’s Pond” was formed over one hundred years ago in the early 1900s, when the Borden Milk Company dammed the stream with a 255-foot long concrete dam, filling the wetland in with water. The ice that formed on the pond in the winter would have been harvested using teams of horses and packed to keep milk cold during shipping.  Borden’s sent rail shipments of dairy to New York City until the mid-1930’s when the plant closed.

The forested areas of the property were at one time part of a dairy farm, and would have been cleared for pasture.  The farm was owned by the Browning family, which is said to have had links to the poets Robert  Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The meadow area of the property near the parking lot was once a town baseball field.

In 1998, volunteers raised money to purchase 52 acres of the property. This community group formed Borden’s Pond Preserve, and in 1999, worked with CLC to raise $240,000 to purchase and protect the land for public recreation. In the winter of 2006, the pond’s concrete dam breached, draining the pond and allowing the stream to flow as it would have in years past.  Today, the site is a wetland with great opportunities for watching birds and other wildlife.