Sessions Woods

• Beaver Pond Trail – 2.6 miles
  • The main trail here is a wide gravel loop road around the property that is fairly hilly but easily traversable and provides access to all the side views and cut-through trails. There are many
  • The boardwalk out to the waterfowl blind in Beaver Marsh was closed as of January 2025. The viewing blind on the backside of the loop was a fun side visit. The 30′ Lookout Tower sits atop a hill (Negro Hill) at 750′ above sea level, certainly an old fire lookout very similar to the one at Southford Falls.  The view is northeast with a cool profile identifier of the far ridges you can see from the top like Lamentation Mountain. Another short side trail leads to the waterfall known as Negro Hill Brook Falls. The falls are about 20′ tall with up to 3 separate plunges among the rocks.
  • The trail also passes the youth camping area, summer house pavilion, outdoor classroom amphitheater, and the backyard wildlife area.
• Crosscut Trail – 0.4 miles
• Tree ID Trails – 0.4 miles
• Forest Meadow Trail –

Acquired by the state in 1981 or 1982 from the Sessions family. In the mid-1800s John Humphrey Sessions moved from Vermont to Bristol and started J. H. Sessions & Sons, a firm specializing in trunk hardware. The family acquired several tracts of land in Bristol and Burlington. In 1957, the Sessions family sold one of these in Burlington to the New York Conference of the Methodist Church who operated it as a summer camp. The Church could no longer afford to operate the summer camp and so put the land up for sale in 1980. The State was interested in purchasing, but there was a developer willing to pay double so a group of Burlington residents banded together to form the Friends of Sessions Woods and convinced the church to sell it to the state. In 2004, Sessions Woods acquired a large additional tract of land from the New Britain Water Department, almost doubling the size of the protected area.

• Connecticut History – Saving Sessions Woods (2022)
• CTMQ – Sessions Woods WMA (2014)