Saving a pocket of enchantment in South Jersey
'Mockernut hickory. Tulip poplar. Beech," says Lloyd B. Shaw, guiding me through a majestic stand of trees around Laurel Lake.
'Mockernut hickory. Tulip poplar. Beech," says Lloyd B. Shaw, guiding me through a majestic stand of trees around Laurel Lake.
He points to a turtle sunning itself on a log as the water ripples below.
"Painted turtle. No, a red-bellied!"
As for the birds ("that's a cardinal singing"), Shaw has counted 200 species in this lush little corner of Laurel Springs, where he grew up and lives.
"What you get to see in your own backyard," he says, "really is amazing."
Welcome to "Whitman Woods" (whitmanwoods.org), the aspirational name for a 31/2-acre property that has won deep affection, but nonetheless needs a preservation-minded buyer willing to permanently allow public access.
Besides dramatic scenery - the surface of the lake lies at the bottom of a 20-foot-deep ravine - the woods also have associations with the poet Walt Whitman, who summered and sunbathed nearby. The landscape along the Big Timber Creek, which flows into the lake, inspired him.
"People go there and are enchanted. It's a cathedral of birdsong," says Elizabeth Kuehner Smith.
Her grandfather, a Camden businessman named Herman Kuehner, built a summer home on the property nearly a century ago; his descendants began to actively consider selling the land in 2006.
"This journey," Kuehner Smith says from her Miami home, "has been epic."
Indeed; a proposed partnership with the Walt Whitman Arts Center in Camden didn't pan out. And neither Camden County nor Laurel Springs, which already maintains a Whitman-theme park a few blocks upstream, is interested in taking on the project.
"We wish [Kuehner Smith] well," Laurel Springs Mayor Thomas A. Barbera says. "The town would be happy if the woods were put into the hands of people who would care for it."
One possibility: The North American Land Trust, a Chadds Ford nonprofit that has been in discussions with Kuehner Smith since 2015.
"We're supportive," Steven Carter, the trust's stewardship coordinator, tells me.
"We certainly hope they can get where they want to get to, and we're interested in potentially partnering with them to do that, under the right circumstances."
A $1 million fund-raising campaign is set to begin. Kuehner Smith says the money would enable the trust to purchase, improve, and maintain the site in perpetuity as a passive public park.
Envisioned as a nature sanctuary and a tribute to the Good Gray Poet, Whitman Woods would include an "outdoor classroom" within the foundation of the home that once stood there, but otherwise would be unchanged.
A former journalist who does branding and marketing for nonprofit organizations, the charismatic Kuehner Smith, 59, has cultivated a cadre of supporters who share her reverence for the wooded spot overlooking the water.
"I like the spirituality of it," says Chet Atkins, the CEO of Jersey Premier Outdoor Media, who is donating digital billboard space on Route 42 to promote the project.
The display utilizes an eye-catching electronic image of Whitman, based on one created by the esteemed illustrator/artist Allen Crawford, of Mount Holly. His book, Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself, was published by Tin House in 2014.
The Big Timber Creek landscape "is just as significant a site as Walden Pond, frankly," says Crawford, referring to the Massachusetts locale that inspired Henry David Thoreau. "We need to save as much as we possibly can around that area."
Environmental consultant Joe Arsenault of Franklin Township remembers the woods from his Laurel Springs childhood.
"The woods is a place for contemplation in an otherwise-hectic suburban area - and the last open space in Laurel Springs with lake access," Arsenault says.
With what he describes as unusual topography and geology, the site "is a slice of an otherwise obliterated landscape," Arsenault notes.
Says Cherry Hill landscape architect Amy Cieslewicz, "Right here in this dense suburban fabric, you step out and walk a few feet and you feel like you're in a transformative space."
Developers, meanwhile, have approached the owners with other sorts of transformation in mind.
"I have exhausted the modest operating fund [for the woods] left by our mother in 2009," Kuehner Smith says. "It has become a huge personal financial drain I cannot carry.
"We must convey it into conservation now," she adds, "or lose the land to development."
What a terrible loss that would be.
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