Linda Brownson was introduced to New England when she decided to pursue a doctorate in Boston. She made trips up into Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine and was charmed by the difference between these landscapes and the ones she grew up with in Texas.
After she finished her degree, she was poised to go into consulting. She had written a dissertation about cultural barriers to globalization and how to negotiate the differences between French and American corporate cultures, in particular. She and her husband had already purchased a place on 200 acres in Wentworth to get away from city life. “I became immersed in the land,” she said, “and I did an about-face. I just became passionate about it.”
She became a supervisor of the Grafton County Conservation District. “I took most every workshop that UNH [Cooperative Extension] offered related to wildlife and habitat.” Brownson said. “And I started several projects on the property. We began to manage it for wildlife habitat. I took an interest in birds of the forest interior, which have been overlooked in habitat work.
“When we first bought the farm in 2003,” Brownson recalled, “one of our neighbors, Quentin Mack, came over. He brought along a copy of the NHTOA magazine and slapped it down, telling us, ‘This is the only organization you need to belong to.’ We literally signed up on his recommendation.”
Brownson sees value in being an NHTOA member because of the contacts she makes with others interested in timber, wildlife and land stewardship. I would recommend NHTOA membership to anyone with an interest in these areas, whether they own a couple of acres or thousands of acres.
She met fellow NHTOA member Ann Davis in the Cooperative Extension’s Covert Cooperators program. Davis thought that Brownson’s primary interest in the forest as wildlife habitat would be a good addition to the NHTOA board and recommended her.
Brownson has taken a somewhat winding road to her present focus on land management in northern New England. Born in Ohio, she was raised in Texas and for many years owned a French restaurant and jazz club in Houston. Her interest in French culture eventually sent her down an academic path. In 1991 she enrolled as a “mature student” at the University of Minnesota, where she majored in international relations and foreign studies, graduating summa cum laude. She went on to do her Ph.D. in sociology of culture at Boston University, finishing in 2005. But thanks to the beauty of rural New England, sociology’s loss was conservation’s gain.
Soon after Brownson and her husband moved to the Wentworth property, instead of starting her consulting business, they built a pond, which attracted mink, ospreys, red-winged blackbirds, and herons. They created a mosaic of habitats. “Shrubland is in decline,” Brownson said, “so we maintain it [in that seral stage]. Last year we cut six acres for stand improvement. It opens up the ground. Last year when I was out walking there, I almost tripped over a woodcock on the nest. They know the habitat has changed.”
The Brownsons recently sold their Sacred Paw Farm to “like-minded people” and Linda encourages all her neighbors to practice conservation. In fact, she takes it much further afield than her neighborhood. Last year she was a member of the panel at a conference organized by the NHTOA, Forest Society, and UNH Cooperative Extension called “Women on the Land.” Part of the ongoing Women in the Woods program, it was a huge success and growing in numbers this year.
She has also served on the NHTOA board of directors for many years and served a two-year term as president. Governor Sununu appointed her in 2023, to serve on the New Hampshire Low-Grade Timber and Wood Emerging Market Commission, representing landowners, to study the state of the low-grade wood market and create a final report with recommendations. Brownson retired from the Board last year, though is still a member of its Policy Committee.
In 2011, from her position as a Grafton County Conservation District supervisor, Brownson joined the National Association of Conservation Districts (NACD). “I’ve been active in this organization,” she said. “I’ve traveled around the country, served on the executive board. NACD promotes responsible management and conservation of natural resources by representing locally-led conservation districts through grassroots advocacy, education and partnerships, like NRCS. We are actively engaged with Congress and federal agencies to address barriers to forest health. The NACD also publishes education materials for children, as well as teacher materials like ‘May the Forest Be With You Always’” On the state level, she served as Chair of the State Conservation Committee and President of the New Hampshire Association of Conservation Districts.
But she does not let her traveling prevent her from continuing to work on the land. She has, for example, been engaged in a “mast tree release” program. Mast (nut and fruit)-producing trees are identified and the non-mast-producers are thinned from around them.
She gave special attention to one mast producer, the American beech. Brownson looked for trees that were free of the bark disease—caused by a combined assault of a scale insect and Nectria, a canker fungus—and removed all the diseased trees nearby. In this way it is hoped that when the resilient, disease-free trees reproduce, the next generation will be as resistant to the bark ailment as the parent tree. (Beech trees have both male and female flowers on one tree and can self-pollinate.)
When it comes to harvesting trees, Brownson does not focus on stumpage, but on habitat creation. “We did patch cuts, from 2 to 5 acres,” she said. “We cut most everything in a selected area to produce shrubland.” Part of Sacred Paw is dominated by softwoods—white pine, balsam fir, red spruce, hemlock and a single large northern white cedar—but the majority of the woodland consists of mixed hardwoods with red oak, maple, and yellow birch dominant.
Brownson has been an avid hunter for much of her life. She has planted many fruit trees, but also hawthorn to encourage the ruffed grouse, which have been declining in her part of New Hampshire. Although she sometimes misses the more diverse hunting opportunities of Texas and she has given up grouse hunting with the passing of her English setter, Brownson still goes out each year and gets one deer and one turkey for the table.