Photo Essay: Home to rare wildlife and small towns, a rural region plans for the future

If you began on the Chesapeake Bay and followed the Susquehanna River north about 400 miles, you would find yourself in central New York with a choice to make.

You could continue on that main tributary to its headwaters in the heart of Cooperstown—home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and a slew of other museums. There, tourism reigns and many seasonal residents overlook Otsego Lake, on which author James Fenimore Cooper bestowed the enchanting nickname “Glimmerglass.”

Or you could travel against the flow of one of the Susquehanna’s first main tributaries, the Unadilla River, then divert course once again to follow Butternut Creek through a rural region whose future is less assured.

Along the creek, from south to north, you would find towns like Gilbertsville, Morris and New Lisbon. Altogether there are ten municipalities within Butternut Valley, and although each has its own distinctive character, the towns are similar in that they fall just outside the influence of Cooperstown’s tourism economy. Their small populations have declined. For example, at about 1,800 residents, Morris is smaller than it was in the year 1850. And the population of the entire valley, as estimated by the Otsego County Conservation Association, is only about 4,500 people.

“Certainly, we're losing young folks; farms are still going out of business,” said Graham Stroh, former executive director of the Butternut Valley Alliance. Despite the challenges, Graham said, "we’re seeing [positive] things happening.”

Today, Butternut Valley is composed of residents who have found many different reasons to call it home. They include families with history going back centuries as well as relative newcomers. A few small farms still sandwiched between the creek and Butternut Valley’s steep forested hillsides recall a time before many of the area’s many small dairies and other industries fell to market pressures. Meanwhile, others are drawn by a landscape that has slowly experienced what could be called a rewilding. Butternut Creek has some of the best water quality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed; between 1985 and 2019, nitrogen pollution dropped by roughly a third and phosphorus was cut in half. And the creek hosts species that have winked out of existence almost everywhere else in that region.

Overall, Butternut Valley is facing the same challenges as other rural communities in the Chesapeake watershed. How do you keep your young people from leaving to pursue opportunities elsewhere? How do you lift up communities while preserving environmental resources—the healthy land and water that the region depends on? And with the northeast experiencing a greater rise in extreme weather than any other region in the United States, how do you build resilience into your local infrastructure with limited technical capacity and a small-town budget?

In 2021, that last question was made more urgent as major floods yet again hit the towns of Morris and Gilbertsville, causing millions of dollars in damages but falling well below the level required for federal support. Fortunately, a slew of local organizations and planners have already been working for years to map out ways that investments at the county, state and federal levels can secure a promising future for Butternut Valley.

The first-ever Butternut Creek Watershed Management Plan (Management Plan) has been years in the making. It was preceded by a watershed assessment produced by the Upper Susquehanna Coalition (USC) and funded by the Chesapeake Bay Program through a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Small Watersheds Grant in 2016. The Otsego County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) prepared a background report on Butternut Creek in early 2021. The Management Plan was completed later that year, having been coordinated by the Otsego County Conservation Association (OCCA), the SWCD, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Butternut Valley Alliance (BVA). Additional assistance came from several local agencies and organizations.

According to Danny Lapin, an environmental planner with OCCA, the Management Plan would help the SWCD create a countywide stream bank restoration program that would tackle “a huge backlog of stream banks that need to be restored.” And it will lay the groundwork to hire a point person “to help each of the 10 municipalities implement, plan and design water quality projects that would benefit the creek and the local communities within there.”

This photo essay comprises a portrait of the Butternut Valley through its residents. It’s also a look at some of the work being done by organizations like the Otsego Land Trust (OLT), which has permanently protected nearly 1,600 acres in the Butternut Creek watershed, and the BVA, as they encourage residents to see their connection to their environment and to formulate a vision of the future that the entire valley can work towards.