Name: Jan Wright
Position: Volunteer and Historical Tour Guide at Assabet National Wildlife Refuge
National Parks She Most Wants to Visit: Glacier National Park and Grand Teton National Park

It’s a crisp October day at Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Gravel and leaves crunch under my feet as Jan Wright leads the way down the path through the woods wearing her official Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge sweatshirt. Ordinarily, Jan gives only two or three tours like this per year, to a group of up to 30 people. This week, she’s graciously come in to show me around. Up ahead, a small hill rises from the leaf-covered ground. On one side of the hill, the earth ends abruptly, and a metal and concrete wall surrounds a heavy metal door, like an apocalyptic Hobbit hole.

As she unlocks the heavy padlock holding the door closed, Jan explains what we’re about to see. The bunkers were built after the outbreak of World War II to store ammunition and supplies for the war effort. “The dirt is for insulation and security, because this was during the war, and because we’re thirty miles away from Boston Harbor. That was the main thing- the enemy gunboats, [their weapons] couldn’t go any further than about 25 miles at that point. So they built it here because they knew it was safe.”

To explain why there’s an ammunition bunker at a wildlife refuge, it’s important to understand where Assabet River came from in the first place. In order to give her tours, Jan had to learn about a century of history in a hurry. At her first tour, she jokes, “There’s the frying pan, and I just jumped right into it.” On our walk up the hill, Jan takes me back to the late 1800s, when the land around us was parceled into farms growing apples, cranberries, and root vegetables. But things quickly changed when the United States entered World War II. The military needed a large parcel of land near Boston where they could build a munitions depot, and they found it in a group of farms straddling the borders of the towns of Sudbury, Hudson, Maynard, and Stowe. Farmers were served an eviction notice, and had only a few weeks to relocate. Some of their homes were moved off site by the military, and still stand today in surrounding towns. Others were simply abandoned and burnt. Many of the farmers were paid as little as ten cents on the dollar for the land on which they’d built their livelihoods. Fifty years later, the actions of the military and their contractors rendered the land so polluted by arsenic and other toxins that it would have to be placed on the EPA’s national priorities list.

“[The farmers] were thinking they’d come back,” Jan explains. “But who’d want to farm on a Superfund site?”

Left: The Hill Farm House, circa 1928, courtesy of the Assabet River NWR records. Most of the structures on the property were demolished before the refuge opened. Right, the chimney of the house, all that remains of the building.

It took nearly twenty years for what would soon become the Assabet River NWR to be completely remediated. Soil contaminated with heavy metals was scraped away and sealed in pits, where it no longer posed a threat to the public. In 2000, the site was officially turned over to the Department of the Interior, replacing military aircraft with flocks of migratory birds. Jan’s involvement with project stretches back to 1998, when she saw a notice in a local paper for a discussion of the site’s future transition to a wildlife refuge. She decided to attend. “Three weeks later,” she says, “I got a snail mail invitation to come to Great Meadows in Sudbury for their informational meeting on how to start a friends group. And here I am, fifteen years later.” She’s a charter member of the Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge (her member number is “3”) and serves on their board. Now, she also sits on the board of directors of the Friends of Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge. Later, I ask whether there’s anywhere new on the property she’d like to visit, and she laughs again. “You mean, is there anywhere I’d like to go back to?”
As we walk back to the visitor center, we chat about Jan’s life. For many years, she flew across the country in her friend’s plane, called Whiskey, and has seen 40 states from the sky. Now that she’s retired, she still enjoys traveling. Today, she’s driving me up the refuge’s trails. Back at the visitor center, Jan heads back into the office to borrow the keys to one of the refuge’s vehicles, a hybrid Ford Escape. At one point in our tour, a family stops us to ask about the bunkers. Jan immediately leaps out of the truck to explain their former function, and the father is visibly stunned when she mentions German U-boats coming into Boston Harbor. After a conversation with them, we get back in the truck. “Every time someone comes down,” Jan says, “I go into tour guide mode.” This encounter confirms what I’d already observed about Jan: she knows a lot about this place, and she also truly cares about it. In the several hours we spend walking the property, her determination to make others appreciate Assabet River as much as she does is apparent in everything she says.

The refuge has changed a lot since Jan first encountered it. “We worked five years to get this place open, at least the trails, and that’s all I did for a long time. I learned to post boundary markers and find the bunkers.” She laughs. “This was like our private park for a long time. We were here, we walked every square foot of this place. You would not believe how many square feet there are.” Later, she grows somber. Jan worries about visitors who might not respect Assabet’s history, and the fragility of the ecosystems here. The refuge offers miles of biking trails, which have become extraordinarily popular in the last few years. She has become concerned that some riders don’t stay on the trails, which could put historical artifacts at risk. The wetlands at Assabet River also support unique species, like the threatened Blanding’s turtle– when visitors ride carelessly, or try to bring their dogs into the refuge, they put these species at risk.

This is precisely why historical programs like Jan’s are so important. For suburban dwellers, the refuge is a place to get outside and explore nature. For the volunteers and staff at Assabet River, it’s so much more than that. As the refuge becomes increasingly popular, it will be even more important that visitors remember exactly why this place exists, and how it got here. If they don’t, they won’t understand why it needs to be protected. After spending four hours with Jan, I’m excited by all the stories she’s told me. Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge tells three overlapping stories, of the farmers who lived here, the military and contractors that came in later, and the refuge it is today. These stories are inextricable from each other, but that’s sometimes easy to forget when you’re surrounded by lush green forest.

As for Jan, she’s around to make sure none of these stories are forgotten. As we drive back to the visitor center, I ask Jan how long she thinks she’ll volunteer at Assabet River. “Well,” she responds pragmatically. “As long as I can walk.”