CORRECTION APPENDED

Harvard said this week that it had no plans to sell a graduate’s 99-acre gift to the Harvard Forest, after reports of a potential sale of the Hamilton, Mass., property drew concern from local environmentalists.

Harvard was considering selling the Hamilton experimental forest to the Trustees of Reservations, a Massachusetts preservation society, The Boston Globe reported last month.

But in a statement released Wednesday, Harvard spokesman Robert P. Mitchell said there are “no current discussions about or plans for change” in the ownership of the land, which was given to Harvard in the 1927 will of former Boston mayor Nathan Matthews.

In a statement to the Globe last month, Mitchell said that Harvard had “initiated an evaluation” of the Hamilton property in response to an inquiry from the Trustees of Reservations about possibly acquiring a “small piece” of the land.

John L. Hamilton, a member of the town’s conservation commission who attended Harvard Law School, said he opposed selling the land because he did not believe the Trustees of Reservations could fulfill the goals outlined by Matthews, an 1875 graduate of Harvard College and alumnus of Harvard Law School. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

Matthews’ will conditioned the gift on Harvard holding and maintaining the property as “an experimental station in forestry for the benefit of all persons and institutions in New England that may be interested in such matters.”

The Trustees “are a wonderful organization, but they don’t have the resources or expertise to manage this properly,” Hamilton said. “They’re not regularly engaged in the business of forestry education.”

The Hamilton community also expressed concern that parts of the land could be resold to developers.

Associate Vice President of Harvard Real Estate Services James Gray said those worries could be put to rest. He said reports of the negotiations were exaggerated and that talks had never passed a “casual and preliminary” stage.

“That is simply not our plan today and will never be our plan to develop [the land] in any for-profit way or sell it to anyone who would that for that matter,” Gray said.

“It really got a lot of people exercised over something that was much ado about nothing,” he added.

Even if Harvard had sought to sell the land, it may have faced an uphill legal battle because of the restrictions outlined in the will.

“The gentleman in this will said he was leaving it to Harvard for a specific purpose,” said Suffolk Probate and Family Court register Richard Iannella, whose office keeps the will. “Obviously Harvard can’t use the argument ‘we don’t have the money to maintain it.’ They have the largest [university] endowment in the world.”

Iannella added that Harvard could argue that it would put its resources to use for forestry preservation on another University property but that the will’s wording would be a significant hurdle.

Matthews “obviously wanted to see this remain a forest forever,” he said. “It’s difficult to undo intent.”

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.


CORRECTION

The Jan. 18 article "Harvard: No Plans To Sell 99 Acres of Forest" incorrectly stated that John L. Hamilton graduated from Harvard Law School. In fact, he graduated from Harvard College in 1966, and attended law school at the University of Maine.