Alice Merritt Recreation Area & Berg Field

This Land Has Hart & Merritt
Alice Merritt Recreation Area & Berg Field, Hartland
November 2022 & June 2024

Hartland is a beautiful town. If I was a motorcycle rider, I’d go to Hartland every nice day I could. I would ride up Route 20… and keep riding right on past these two adjacent properties and enjoy the open road.

However, I’m not a motorcycle rider. Rather, I’m a person – excuse me, I’m the only person who feels compelled to do everything there is to do in every Connecticut town. This includes driving up Route 20, stopping, and checking out these two properties simply because there are trails here.

I visited Berg Field first simply because it was on a list of Hartland Trails I’d found and I passed a big sign for it one day. However, I do not recommend you seek to hike at…

Berg Field

Hartland is a rather fascinating town for several reasons. The biggest one is that the split here between East Hartland and West Hartland is a true split and they are distinctly different places. The drive between east and west is stunning around Barkhamsted Reservoir, but it probably feels like an eternity to complete it for those who must do it every day. Berg Field in East Hartland, home of the one school in the entire town.

That School is The Hartland School and it serves grades preschool through grade 8. In 2024, this totaled 111 students. If you were unfamiliar with the population of Hartland, now you have a better idea.

There is a trail at Berg Field. It connects the youth sports fields at Berg Field to the school. Which is attached to the town hall. And the volunteer fire department. The post office is across the street. This is Hartland. This is what you get.

So, yeah. This is a purely functional trail, I’m assuming, that it exists more or less for school kids to get to the fields.

Oh, there’s also a covered pavilion and a surprisingly impressive Little Free Library here in 2024 as well.

After “hiking” here in late 2022, I drove south and passed a sign for something called…

Alice Merritt Recreation Area

… I made note of it and promptly forgot about it for a year. I still had to get to the Hartland Historical Society’s museum at the Gaylord House Museum and until I was able to do so, there was no reason to return to Hartland for this chunk of woods.

Small town history museums are hardly ever open, but I finally had a summer first-Sunday-of-the-month open between the hours of 2 and 4 in 2024. This meant it was time to check out ol’ Alice Merritt’s Recreation Area.

A recreation area reserved only for Hartland residents.

As always, I “had to” hike this property for research purposes. And my research paid dividends, as Hartland will be happy to read that an authority on Connecticut hiking (moi) is here to tell you that you have absolutely no reason to hike here. (Though I cannot imagine Hartland has the resources to patrol the 3 scofflaw non-residents per year that ever come here.)

There is some history here which I find mildly interesting. Camp Alice Merritt is the location of the first Hartford Council Girl Scout Camp. The camp opened in 1925 and was sold to the town of Hartland in 1992. They’ve kept the trails clear for the most part, and weirdly, there’s no cut-through trail to Berg Field as I’d have bet there would be by now. I’m sure you’re wondering who this Alice Merritt woman was.

Alice Merritt was an American politician who was the first woman to be elected to the Connecticut State Senate, in 1924. Reelected in 1926, she served in the senate from 1925 to 1929. So that’s cool. What else, Wikipedia?

A Republican, Merritt represented Connecticut’s 2nd Senate District, which at that time comprised the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth wards of the city of Hartford. In February 1925, Merritt became the first woman to preside over a Connecticut State Senate session. She served on the Education, Capital House and Grounds, and Federal Regulations Committees and chaired the Committee on Humane Institutions. She was a member of the League of Women Voters.

Impressive.

Seems like she was a nice woman. Anything more, Mr. Wiki?

Merritt opposed welfare and other forms of government intervention and voted against a child labor law.

Not so cool. Of course we have no idea what law that was she voted against but that’s not a good look 100 years later. As noted, she was active in Girl Scouting and eventually was appointed New England regional chair of the organization and was elected to the board of directors of the national organization in 1943. Camp Alice P. Merritt in Hartland was named in her honor.

And here we are. There’s essentially one loop trail which leaves from a former camp building towards Berg Field then around to a picturesque pond before heading up a gravel road to complete the loop. It’s maybe 2/3 of a mile in length and when I walked it, it was absolutely plagued with mosquitos, gnats, no-see-ums, horseflies, and deer flies. Just insanity. Sure we had a wet spring, but there were wet springs before, too. Was it like this when the girls camped here? What a nightmare.

Many of the former camp structures remain on their last legs. I guess it costs too much money to remove them from the woods, so we get to see their slow deterioration. Remember, this place closed in 1992, so not forever ago. There are maybe a dozen structures still remaining.

The pond is really nice. I did actually pass some – I assume – Hartland residents smoking and drinking at the lake pavilion. We agreed that the bugs were brutal, but they had no idea what it was like in the woods.

So there you have it. Hartland, I hope you’re not too mad at me for trespassing. After all, I can’t imagine anyone will be coming up here to walk these walks after reading this page. Don’t be angry.

Have a hart. My work here has Merritt.

Hartland Historical Society pictures of the camp in its heyday
CTMQ Hikes Hartland’s Town Trails