Williams College’s free festival at its 2,640-acre research forest includes woodworking demonstrations, hikes, live music, and shuttle vans from campus.
Saturday, October 17, 10am–1pm | Williamstown, MA | Free
Williams College holds its Hopkins Memorial Forest Fall Festival on Saturday, October 17 at 271 NW Hill Road, an outdoor celebration of the changing season and the forest’s resources. Admission is free.
The program is hands-on. Visitors can watch traditional woodworking demonstrations, press cider, go on hikes, listen to music, and try a cross-cut saw competition. There are also children’s activities. Local vendors will be selling fall-themed treats as well.
The festival doubles as a showcase for the research done in the forest. Students and staff from the Williams College Environmental Analysis Lab and the Biology Department will explain the forest’s weather station and the data collection under way there, and the festival highlights the northern saw-whet owl banding program, which has run each fall for more than two decades. Local environmental groups, among them Williamstown Rural Lands and the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, will be on hand promoting their own activities.
Parking is tight, so organizers encourage carpooling or cycling. Shuttle vans leave from behind Paresky, the campus student center, every 15 minutes starting at 10am.
Hopkins Memorial Forest has been managed by Williams for teaching and research for more than 50 years. It has hiking and cross-country ski trails, a visitor center, the Buxton Garden, and a maple sugaring operation. The land was once Buxton Farms, which Col. Amos Lawrence Hopkins assembled between 1887 and 1910 into an agricultural showplace of more than 1,600 acres. Hopkins was a railroad manager and the son of Mark Hopkins, the longtime Williams president. His widow gave the land to the college in 1934 as a memorial to him, and Williams deeded it to the U.S. Forest Service the next year for use as an experimental research forest.
Hopkins Memorial Forest, 271 NW Hill Road, Williamstown, MA. More at events.williams.edu.
