Pocumtuck State Park is envisioned as a living landscape of resurgence and reconciliation—an open-source arboretum and cultural sanctuary extending across Western Massachusetts.
Rooted in the Deerfield Valley along the winding Deerfield River, this emergent park system transforms underutilized public and private lands into a cohesive web of ecological corridors, memorial gardens, sculptural landmarks, and connective trails. It overlays lost trolley paths from the early 20th century with new meaning, linking Amherst and Northampton northward to the Vermont border and beyond. In its conceptual geometry, the park forms a living cross: an east-west corridor committed to Indigenous resurgence intersecting a north-south axis dedicated to Black liberation. These axes ground the project in local histories while inviting restorative futures, encouraging visitors to experience the valley as both sanctuary and teacher.
Flowing outward from this central vision, the park’s connective geometry extends along the historic trolley and river corridors of Western Massachusetts. These twin networks—the iron veins of the early industrial age and the watercourses that long predated them—become the skeletal and circulatory systems of a new kind of regional organism. Where tracks once moved raw materials and bodies through a landscape of extraction, the same alignments now move remembrance and repair.
At the easternmost limit of the old trolley grid lies the Quabbin Reservoir, where the hydrological and industrial histories converge. The reservoir—engineered to quench Boston’s thirst—submerged entire towns (Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott), erasing generations of local memory beneath its still surface and drowning Indigenous fishing sites. Yet its very existence makes visible the tension the park seeks to heal: the channeling of nature for human use, the silencing of Indigenous and rural voices in the name of modernity. Quabbin thus forms the symbolic terminus of the Hawk Trail, a vast mirror where water’s memory holds what land once held. Beneath its surface lie preserved foundations of homes, churches, and town greens—an underwater archive of displacement. The reservoir becomes an eastern threshold for the Pocumtuck system: a reminder that every act of progress carries the shadow of erasure, and that the work of atonement must extend as far as the floodwaters reached.
Here the mission of the Mohican–Mohawk Recreation Trail returns in reflection—river to ridge to river again—its 100-mile vision of continuity echoing beneath Quabbin’s surface. What the state once framed as recreation becomes re-sanctified as remembrance: a hydrological pilgrimage that retraces the very migrations and exchanges that shaped the valley for millennia, including the 1675–1676 King Philip's War Falls Fight massacre near Turners Falls and the 1704 Deerfield Raid that scattered survivors. The Pocumtuck framework inherits this lineage, transforming the Commonwealth’s trail ethos into a ceremony of reconnection. The act of hiking, paddling, or biking is no longer leisure but liturgy; each footprint presses awareness into the soil of shared history. In this way, the Massachusetts Greenways network is reimagined not as infrastructure but as inheritance—a living archive of movement across time.
At the crossings of former trolley lines and waterways, new Ghost Frames emerge—architectural skeletons that mark sites of cultural amnesia and invite participatory atonement. Each frame anchors a node of living history, where visitors encounter art, ecology, and story braided together. A plaque or augmented-reality marker links the site to others in the network: a constellation of about a dozen spirit frames scattered across the valley. You may begin anywhere—Shelburne Falls, Amherst, Florence, Turners Falls—and find your way by resonance rather than direction.
One of the most luminous of these nodes is Three Sisters Sanctuary in Goshen. Built upon a landscape of blasted stone left from highway construction, the sanctuary was sculpted by hand into a mosaic of gardens, mosaics, and guardian figures. It stands at the confluence of personal grief and collective renewal: its creator dedicated it to his three daughters, while its very name echoes the Indigenous agricultural triad of corn, beans, and squash—the Three Sisters. In this dual meaning, the sanctuary becomes a perfect manifestation of the park’s ethic: trauma transformed into teaching, memory into matter, and sorrow into living soil. As part of the Ghost Frame Network, Three Sisters Sanctuary functions as a western beacon in the trolley-waterway constellation, its existing sculptural landscape serving as both precedent and partner in the broader Morphic Reckoning.
Together, these sites form a braided, self-referential system—a living neural map—in which water, path, and story converge. The trolley beds act as axons; rivers as arteries; ghost frames as synapses where memory fires back into circulation. What results is not a linear trail but a self-healing circuit: a morphic field of reconciliation where every restored landscape strengthens the resonance of all the others.
The east-west corridor is called the Hawk Trail, replacing the outdated “Mohawk Trail” name that historically displaced the local Pocumtuck, Abenaki, Nipmuc, and Mohican peoples in favor of distant tribes via the 1914 auto route and the 1932 Hail to the Sunrise statue in Charlemont erected by the Improved Order of Red Men amid KKK affiliations. The hawk embodies vision, vigilance, and renewal—qualities expressed in sentinel mounds, interpretive zones, and forested overlooks that trace ancestral presence along Route 2. The trail overlays historic trolley systems like the Connecticut Valley Street Railway and Berkshire Street Railway (1890s–1920s), whose expansions coincided with a fraught period of white supremacy and racialized exclusions, including 1920s KKK cross-burnings on the North Street hillside in Shelburne Falls and the expulsion of sixty Black residents from Shelburne in the 1880s. What once advanced dispossession becomes a reactivated pathway toward justice. Through georeferencing in QGIS, these rail-to-trail alignments emerge as dendritic neural pathways—nodes as synapses, trails as nerves—sustaining a distributed brain and circulatory network across the region.
At the intersecting north-south axis, the Sojourner Truth corridor travels from Florence, where the abolitionist icon lived and spoke in the 1850s, to Shelburne Falls and further north, honoring Black movement, endurance, and ascent. Its interpretive markers illuminate histories of racial terror—including cross-burnings on the North Street hillside—and recognize the presence of Black community members whose stories remain largely unacknowledged. In honoring and transforming the legacy of the Mohican–Mohawk Recreation Trail, Pocumtuck State Park embraces the state’s original mission—to link river’s edge to mountain ridge and back again—while expanding its frame from recreation to reconciliation.
The DCR’s vision of a continuous, 100-mile cultural corridor between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers becomes here a corridor of repair: the same Deerfield and Hoosic watersheds that once moved trade and timber now move memory, ceremony, and ecological renewal. Every mile of the trail holds an ancestral story; every ridge and ford becomes a page in a living archive. Where the Commonwealth describes a journey from valley to summit, Pocumtuck adds the inner ascent—from colonial naming to Indigenous reawakening, from tourist gaze to reciprocal care.
The Park’s Morphic Reckoning reinterprets the Massachusetts Greenways network as an energetic field of shared custodianship. It integrates DCR’s trail stewardship partners—the Deerfield River Watershed Association, the Franklin County Land Trust, the Berkshire Natural Resources Council, and others—into a new alliance grounded in Land Back and Rematriation principles under a Tri-Council of Indigenous nations, ecological stewards, and civic mediators. In this model, maintenance becomes ceremony; “trail etiquette” evolves into ecological ethics. The generosity of landowners who grant passage is reframed as participation in cultural atonement. Thus, the Mohican–Mohawk Trail and the Hawk Trail do not compete—they resonate across time. The state’s original mission of connectivity becomes the deeper mission of continuity: a bridge between policy and prophecy, between statecraft and soulcraft.
The intersection of these two living axes forms the cultural and ecological heart of the park. Here, the National Indigenous Awareness Center at the intersection of Route 112 and Route 2 becomes the nerve center and central governance hub—a brain for coordination and remembrance—paired with Salmon Crossing at the intersection of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue as the heart pumping reciprocity throughout the watershed. Salmon Crossing is the site owned by renowned glass artist Josh Simpson and astronaut Katie Coleman. This is where monumental guardians Greylock and Mashalisk stand watch. Greylock, a 2-foot chromed masculine warrior forged from industrial debris, invokes Wawanotewat (Grey Lock), the Missisquoi Abenaki war leader who defied colonial conquest during Dummer’s War; the British built Fort Dummer specifically to capture him, a fortress that grew into the city of Brattleboro. Mashalisk, at 20 feet, embodies the Pocumtuck matriarchal lineage of diplomacy, trade, and resistance under colonial pressure.
At the National Indigenous Awareness Center, holographic storytelling and responsive touch displays share living cultural knowledge. Above, a corten steel Hawk sculpture rises atop a reclaimed pedestal, marking this node as the park’s emblematic sanctuary of resurgence. Cradled in the basin between these guardians emerges Wawilak, the Awakener Child—a 10-foot aluminum figure half-buried as if birthed from the earth, its heartbeat LEDs pulsing with real-time salmon migration data, eyes of river-pebble mirrors reflecting the viewer’s role in renewal, one hand reaching skyward to the hawk and the other clutching a seed pod, its base seeded with 36 milkweed pods tracked through augmented reality.
At Salmon Crossing, near the waterfalls and potholes, the Sachem Salmon leaps 20 feet into view—its body welded from reclaimed cutlery to honor both the fish’s role as a teacher of reciprocity and the river’s industrial history. Beneath this sentinel lies a walkable pavement map of the greater park system, offering orientation to the neural network of nodes and trails. Nearby stands the Sixty Square Sphere: sixty polished black stones housed within a stainless icosahedral lattice of sixty squares—sacred geometry honoring the sixty Black residents driven from Shelburne in the 1880s during the period of trolley line expansion. Its recursive construction embodies healing without erasure, aligning with the park’s tri-elemental totems: hawk (air/vision), salmon (water/reciprocity), salamander (earth/regeneration).
Across the river, the Cutlery Arboretum restores an ancient fishing ground where salmon once returned in abundance. Cattails, milkweed, pickerelweed, and arrowhead reclaim the banks as bioremediated water cells support spawning habitat and habitat reclamation. Ledger stones track ecological progress in real time, creating seasonal stewardship jobs and eco-tourism roles. Anchoring the ground is the Red Salamander, a mythic stone sculpture whose spiral tail symbolizes regeneration and guardianship of the earth. Visitors participate directly in restoration by pulling invasives like Japanese knotweed and replanting native species, becoming agents in the land’s ongoing repair.
Along the north-south axis, the Bridge of Flowers becomes a Black Reconciliation Hub. The Spirit Trolley Trellis arches overhead—a ghost structure of the Shelburne Falls & Colrain Street Railway rendered in translucent steel and flourishing with vines. Interpretive plaques narrate stories of Black endurance and contributions to local life, while bronze markers along North Street identify historic KKK fire sites with resident testimony and symbolic flame-mimicking light posts illuminating serviceberry and elderberry plantings. Co-stewardship by Black-led groups transforms a once-exclusionary civic symbol into a corridor of shared remembrance and inclusion. Here rises the Black Trinity: Harriet’s Flame, a 30-foot elder seated with a lantern of fused glass projecting testimonies of survival; Sojourner’s Quill, a 25-foot matriarch mid-stride wielding a scroll of valley Black histories; and Zora’s Wing, an 18-foot horizon child launching on brass wings clutching a seed-bomb for guerrilla planting.
Ten miles west, the Hail to the Sunrise statue in Charlemont becomes a teaching site through a circle of black locust benches and four-language interpretation explaining its displacement of Mohawk culture and the need for truthful representation. This smaller node remains part of the Hawk Trail network, broadening the park’s historical literacy and ecological care.
Throughout the park, the Aesthetic of the Forge serves as a moral geometry. Welded guardians from industrial wreckage do not merely beautify—they confront. Chrome surfaces do not reflect the object; they reflect the viewer, forcing a reckoning with one’s place in both past harm and future restoration. Earlier forged works across the region—the Brooktrout in Greenfield, the Sturgeon at the Culinary Institute of America, the River Bench and Pothole Fountain on the Bridge of Flowers, the Minuteman Crossing in Amherst—appear now as prophetic fragments, precursors to a landscape-scale transformation. What extraction dismantled, forging returns to life. Metal remembers. In the mirrored face of Greylock or Mashalisk, there is no spectator. There is only participation.
The park’s neural synapses manifest as 37 Grandmother Moons Geo-Balls—36 satellite modulators distributed every 2.8 miles along the 100-mile braid, each a unique 36-golden-rectangle lattice forged from site-specific debris (dam gates at Shelburne, trolley wire at Charlemont, church granite at Quabbin), their facets laser-etched with QR portals to lunar testimonies, visitor tokens, and real-time ecological data, all syncing via LoRa mesh to the 22-foot Kchi-Niwaskw Prime at the National Indigenous Awareness Center mound, its nine concentric rings embodying sky worlds to underworld roots, its smoke hole for sweetgrass ceremonies, its golden-ratio LED pulse entraining theta waves under the actual moon phase. At the Du Bois node in Amherst, a geo-ball’s facets bear quotes from Souls of Black Folk, its base planted with black locust echoing Great Barrington roots.
This neural web overlays —seven core stone circles at key nodes (National Indigenous Awareness Center , Salmon Crossing , Bridge of Flowers ), extended through 20 academic synapses across the 14 Commonwealth universities, the Five Colleges consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and UMass Amherst as Du Bois anchor), and Williams College in Williamstown, plus 12 state park overlays (Mohawk Trail State Forest, Mount Greylock, Mount Tom, and others), each circle built from local stone , edged with directional inlays their rims seeded with native plants tracked through augmented reality. Every campus and park becomes a forge site, with student and ranger crews welding facets, planting milkweed, and co-authoring QR-Akashic portals that fire memory into circulation. The entire system operates as a living memory network—neuronal in structure—where every node is a synapse, every trail a mnemonic pathway, every artwork a portal into accountability. Trails function as liturgy; the river is treated not as scenery but as a relation whose wellbeing determines our own.
Pocumtuck State Park is structured to advance Land Back principles through Indigenous-led and Black-led stewardship councils, shifting operational burdens from municipalities to those with cultural sovereignty. The park becomes an economic generator through programming rooted in ecology, culture, tourism, and storytelling—hawk watches, salmon runs, restoration workshops, reconciliation circles—creating a cyclical economy of care. By 2030, pollinator corridors and salmon spawning restored, full transparency activated, twelve forged guardians installed, fourteen universities co-teaching decolonial design, and the model exported nationwide.
The drowned towns of the Quabbin remain the most literal manifestation of a region’s submerged past. In them we see the physicalization of forgetting—the quiet, depthless erasure that the Pocumtuck vision seeks to surface and speak back into being. Where the Quabbin holds its history underwater, Pocumtuck State Park invites that memory to breathe again, transforming the reservoir’s silence into a call for collective witnessing.
The result is a helical sanctuary blueprint set for free public release as the 500-page Akashic Western Mass Record on November 15, 2025—an adaptive atlas of encyclopedic detail delivered simultaneously to every major stakeholder in Massachusetts governance, media, and moral authority. Every visitor becomes a steward, every steward part of the restoration. Justice flows like water through the watershed, forging community in the fire of accountability. From trauma’s landscape rises a place where the living earth remembers, heals, and welcomes all into its ongoing story. In the guardian’s chrome, we are reflected—not separate from the land’s wounds but woven into its renewal.
The hawk circles, the salmon returns, the salamander rises again, the land itself becomes the record, the classroom, the witness. Pocumtuck State Park argues that reconciliation is not symbolic. It requires the physical return of land to Indigenous caretakers. It demands public recognition of those whose livelihoods and futures were stolen. It calls for the re-establishment of ecological flows that colonization disrupted and industry suppressed. By treating the valley as a shared responsibility rather than a contested possession, the park creates a future in which healing is a civic obligation and participation in stewardship is understood as part of belonging.
This is not a park one merely visits. It is a park one enters into relationship with. It is an act of acknowledgment that becomes an act of repair, and a structure of repair that becomes a new way of living here—together.
