In December 2023, Leverett's police chief and fire chief asked the Select Board to reopen Rattlesnake Gutter Road to vehicles. Their argument was simple: a straight shot along the Gutter would save a cruiser or an engine real time getting from the public safety complex on Montague Road to the north end of town, instead of looping around Cave Hill and North Leverett Road. The Select Board heard them out, then voted the other way. Instead of reopening the road, the town moved to discontinue it permanently as a public way, acting on a request from the Rattlesnake Gutter Trust, the group that had spent two decades arguing the opposite case.
If you walk the Gutter regularly, you probably know it as the town's best trail, a mile-plus of packed gravel between Brushy Mountain and Cave Hill with a chasm on one side and a stone wall on the other. What you may not know is that as recently as three years ago, that walk's future was an open question, and the answer the town gave says something about how Leverett actually spends its money and makes its choices.
What the wall is actually holding back
The stone wall along Rattlesnake Gutter Road dates to 1835, built by oxen teams along the north side of the ravine when the road still carried wagon traffic between Leverett center and Moore's Corner. It held for over 150 years. In June 2001, a section of that embankment gave way during a heavy rainstorm, and the town closed the western half of the road to cars for good. For the next twenty-two years, it functioned as an unofficial trail, popular enough that the Daily Hampshire Gazette later called it the town's most-used spot for walking, hiking, and biking.
Then came the summer of 2023, when another intense rainstorm overwhelmed what was left of the road's drainage system and did serious new damage to both the wall and the walking surface. That flood is the reason this became a funded project rather than another decade of patchwork fixes. The Rattlesnake Gutter Trust brought a restoration request to the town's Community Preservation Committee in the fall of 2024, asking for $230,000 toward the road. By the summer of 2025, the Select Board had accepted a construction bid of $299,325 from Clayton D. Davenport, a Greenfield contractor, to rebuild the retaining wall and overhaul the drainage on the discontinued section of the road. Community Preservation Act funds covered $265,000 of that bid, money residents had already voted to set aside at Town Meeting specifically for projects like this one.
By this spring, the Rattlesnake Gutter Trust's own website was reporting that most of the construction was finished and inviting residents back out on the road to see it. If you haven't walked the Gutter since before the flood, the drainage work is the part you'll actually feel underfoot. The point of the project was never to make the road pretty. It was to keep the same washout from taking out the same wall a third time.
The vote that decided what kind of road this is
The choice to discontinue Rattlesnake Gutter Road as a public way, rather than reopen it, is worth sitting with, because it was not a foregone conclusion. Brian Emond, a former member of the Leverett Fire Department who lives in North Leverett, actually argued against his own department's position, telling the Select Board that reopening the road wouldn't meaningfully speed up emergency response and that stationing an engine back at the North Leverett station would do more good. The board sided with that view and with the Trust. Once the discontinuance was final, the property became the town-owned Rattlesnake Gutter Conservation Area, which is the legal name attached to the restoration project and the reason the road can now get trail-grade infrastructure instead of road-grade maintenance forever.
That distinction matters if you live nearby. A public way has to stay open to any vehicle that can legally use it. A conservation area does not. The 2023 vote is why the town could spend CPA money on a pedestrian-scale drainage system instead of a repaving budget, and it is why the wall repair was designed around foot and bike traffic rather than fire engines.
The Co-op is where the trail actually starts
If you're walking the Gutter from the south end, you are almost certainly starting at the Leverett Village Co-op on Rattlesnake Gutter Road itself, which has functioned as the informal trailhead for years. It is also the only place in town to get a hot meal without driving to Amherst or Montague, which is part of why it works as a trailhead in the first place.
The Co-op runs Friday pizza night, a weekly fixture that predates most of the recent trail work and has become the thing people plan a hike around rather than the other way around. Once a month, on the second Saturday, the parking lot and lawn turn into the Rattlesnake Gutter Market, an arts, crafts, and flea market with live music that has featured acts like Sawzaphonic and DJ sets from Brian Boyles spinning old-school New Orleans R&B. It is a small event by any city's standard, but it is the kind of gathering that only exists because a member-owned co-op decided its parking lot could double as a town square.
The same fund is rebuilding the rest of the village
The Community Preservation Act money that fixed the Gutter's wall is not a one-project account. It's the same funding mechanism Leverett is using to restore the 1810 Moore's Corner Schoolhouse, a request for roof, window, and structural repairs that came in alongside the road funding in the same CPA cycle. The Historical Society's case for the schoolhouse was that Leverett once had ten schoolhouses and this is one of the only ones still standing in something close to its original form.
Down the road from the schoolhouse, the old North Leverett Sawmill recently received close to $700,000 from the National Park Service, money that's feeding into a Heritage Park and Nature Trail project centered on the historic mill site. Part of that effort includes an archaeological mapping request for the nearby Graves Ironworks, a mill operation that once made farm tools on North Leverett Road and is now mostly buried under two centuries of streambank growth. None of these projects are flashy. All of them are examples of the same pattern as the Gutter: Leverett doesn't build new landmarks, it keeps voting, one CPA cycle at a time, to keep the old ones from disappearing.
What else is actually walkable right now
The Gutter isn't the only trail worth your Saturday. The East Leverett Trails, maintained by the Leverett Trails Committee, connect a handful of smaller parcels that most people drive past without knowing they're public land. The Bog Bridge crosses Doolittle Brook to link the 4-H Forest with the Gordon King Life Estate, 31 acres that Gordon King and his son deeded to the town's Conservation Commission in 2001 specifically to keep it undeveloped. The bog bridge section is genuinely dynamic terrain. Beavers are active along Doolittle Brook, and the trail committee has noted that the water flow through that stretch changes from one season to the next depending on what the beavers have been building.
If you want elevation instead of wetland, the climb to the New England Peace Pagoda on Cave Hill Road remains the most direct hill walk in town, a moderate uphill push that ends at the first Nipponzan Myohoji pagoda built in the United States, completed in 1986. The Pagoda isn't just scenery. Earlier this month, members of the Pagoda community led a peace walk across the Pioneer Valley to mark the 81st anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, starting with a vigil on the Greenfield Common and continuing on foot through Holyoke, Chicopee, and Springfield. It's a reminder that the hill above Leverett Pond is an active part of a regional tradition, not a static monument.
The pattern underneath all of it
None of these projects happened because Leverett suddenly had extra money. They happened because residents keep choosing, cycle after cycle, to spend Community Preservation Act funds on the specific pieces of the town that would otherwise erode, collapse, or fall apart quietly. The wall that failed in 2001 and again in 2023 is fixed for now because enough people voted to fix it rather than replace it with something easier to maintain. The schoolhouse and the sawmill are getting the same treatment. If you're wondering why a town this small keeps finding money for stone walls and hundred-year-old buildings instead of anything new, that's the answer. Leverett spends to keep what it already has.
If you're weighing a move to Leverett or anywhere else in the Pioneer Valley and want a clearer read on what a specific property or town actually offers, Ashton Realty Group can walk you through it with the same level of detail. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the listing photos show.
