RECIPROCAL NATURE PROMPT

A Visit With History’s Always Worth It

A visit to a garden where history meets nature

Dr. Preeti Singh invited us to write about a garden where history meets nature.

This park is not anywhere near as old as ‘Lodhi Gardens’ described in Dr. Preeti’s story and prompts at the bottom of this page. The USA itself is young compared to the antiquity of that incredible park.

Yet Hudson New Hampshire’s Benson Park is historical as far as this town and my own life are concerned. And it does have about 5 miles of walking trails through nature, wild and landscaped.

This one-time farm for exotic zoo animals was opened to the public in 1924 as Benson’s Wild Animal Farm. Its slogan was, “The Strangest Farm on Earth.”

I remember walking these many well-worn paths over 166 acres through woods and wetlands all my life. I always enjoyed walking in nature. I remember a time from so many summers ago. Me and my uncle, stopping to feed peanuts to the elephants, sometimes chained to steel rings in a concrete floor.

Benson’s Park was opened in 1922 as an exotic animal farm, zoological garden and eventually an amusement park before closing commercial business for good in 1987.

The land was sold to the State of New Hampshire and then sold to the town of Hudson to be preserved as a public park.

This formerly privately owned Zoo and park with the crowds attracted by an almost direct train route and automobile highway to Boston, Massachusetts led this town to develop forest and farmland sometimes too rapidly for its own good.

Our town’s 911 memorial at Benson Park..

including steel beam recovered from Tower One (North Tower) of World Trade Center, NYC.

Twenty three feet and several thousand pounds of twisted metal carried by truck from New York City to Hudson NH’s Benson Park and erected 9/11/2011, the ten year anniversary of the attack.

Once this pond held alligators in the short summer months of my youth.

This area holds some of my fondest memories of going to the park as a young boy.

Here a patch of Ligularia are in bloom.

Not many brightly colored flowers are blooming this late in the season.

Many gardens are sprinkled liberally throughout the park, full of trees and shrubs, annual and perennial flowering plants.

Another attraction I remember from long ago is the gorilla house.

Colossus The Gorilla was the zoo’s biggest attraction when I was growing up. I remember being apprehensive and feeling sorry for him while walking up to his cage as a young boy. Hardly ever leaving this small cell, sometimes when we visited he was in his back room…

Sitting on a stool watching a small television.

Man’s cruelty to nature is only matched by our far too often inhumanity to each other.

So many times I’ve walked down these paths.

Benson’s Wild Animal Farm was less than a half hour travel away from the town where I grew up. I remember visiting many times as a boy with my family and friends. It was alway a big adventure in the summer.

Thanks for getting me out here in nature with history, Dr. Preeti.

Stacked stonewall lined paths lead the way to many surprises such as this recently renovated “Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe” house.

I am thankful that my long time home town kept this land with its historical buildings open and free to the public. I thank the hundreds of volunteers and our town public works department, who starting in 2009, do the work necessary to maintain and renovate this park.

Lee Ameka’s compassionate and beautiful story below contains an element from this park.

Here is Margie Willis always kind and clear-eyed, so well written, view of nature.

Written in response to Dr. Preeti Singh and her prompt as editor of Reciprocal’s nature column. If any of my fellow writers would like to contribute, please read for more information and read about her wonderful walk in nature and history below…

Thank you also to Yana Bostongirl and Sahil Patel of Reciprocal for keeping this publication running.