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| Lafayette Paper Company on Forge Hill Road |
Can you imagine a greenway, a network of foot paths and water trails that meanders from Schunnemunk Mountain on the western edge of Cornwall to the mouth of Moodna Creek, passing enroute the historic 18th-century headquarters of Revolutionary War General Henry Knox?
Carol Ash, head of the Palisade Interstate Park Commission, spoke of this vision recently in Cornwall as she addressed the need to protect lower Moodna Creek from overdevelopment.
At an hour-long session, representatives of a half dozen organizations spoke of the ecological bounty found along the banks of the Moodna. Considered one of the highest qualities estuaries along the Hudson River, industrial pollution and human waste problems have abated in the past decades and the water quality has gone up.
Now the Commission wants to ensure that proposed developments don’t pollute the Moodna watershed through new sources.
Stephanie Lindloff of the American Rivers organization, spoke of a restoration project that would bring back large numbers of alewife, blueback herring, and American eel to the creek, already a source of striped and small bass.
The Palisades Interstate Park Commission and the Trust for Public Land are currently negotiating for the sale of the property of the former Lafayette Paper company along Forge Hill Road. The project would reclaim the land along the creek, tear down the old building, and put it to public use.
The Moodna Watershed Coalition, led by Simon Gruber, has received a $35,000 grant to develop a plan for protecting the watershed, which stretches from its source in Chester to Cornwall-on-Hudson. Gruber says they are compiling a list of protected places along the waterway, as well as one that sets priorities for new areas to be protected. Finally, the grant will allow for the coalition to identify significant threats to the water, open space and habitat of the watershed area.
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