On a September hike past the Weston Road Community Gardens, Wellesley Trails Committee volunteer Rick Mongeau stopped his group and asked them "to really enjoy what we have here," according to The Swellesley Report. The hike was part of the committee's Fall 2026 guided series. It happened a few days after the Select Board reviewed a fire station study that gave two spots on the North 40 the highest scores of any land the study looked at.
Many people in town treat one fact as settled. When Wellesley bought the land in 2014, half of it had to stay open space. That's true. What "open space" means in the purchase agreement is broader than many people assume, and that definition shapes every choice the town now faces about the 46 acres off Weston Road.
The walk you can take this weekend
None of the planning has changed how the land works today. The town's Town Trails Guide describes the North Forty Trail as:
- About a one-mile round trip, marked with purple arrows
- Reached from Turner Road, just off Weston Road
- A route out to the vernal pool boardwalk and the community gardens, with the return through the woods next to them
- Close to the Crosstown Trail, a 6.2-mile green-arrow route along the Cochituate Aqueduct from Natick to the Charles River, which you can pick up at the Weston Road trail parking area or at Warren Park
The guide sends trail questions and problem reports to [email protected].
The gardens cover about 2.5 acres of the North 40 and hold roughly 90 plots. The Swellesley Report's community gardens page says the Natural Resources Commission runs Wellesley's two resident rental gardens. Applications open in January, plots are assigned in February, and both gardens have waiting lists.
One part of the property stays closed. From 1955 through 1960, the town leased part of the land from Wellesley College and used it as a municipal landfill, according to the Friends of the North 40. The Swellesley Report calls that former dump site "now off-limits."
What the 2014 promise says, word for word
The town paid Wellesley College $35 million for the land in 2014. The open space rule is Section 6.02(a) of the purchase and sale agreement, which the Friends of the North 40 reproduces on its development page:
The Buyer will maintain in perpetuity no less than fifty percent (50%) of the total Property area as open space, which may include playing fields, wooded areas, paths and trails and other active and/or passive recreational areas and facilities.
The same section says open space can also include conservation land, forest, agricultural land, corridor parks, small parks and green buffers along roads. The Friends group's note puts it plainly. Open space "can mean playing fields, and facilities to support the fields, such as bathrooms and parking lots."
Only one area has to stay as woods. The agreement says the land between Route 135 and the Cochituate Aqueduct "will remain in a wooded and natural condition." Invasive plant clearing and sound forestry care are still allowed. The Friends group puts that strip at six acres, and those six acres count toward the 50 percent.
| What the agreement covers | What it requires | What that ground can hold |
|---|---|---|
| At least half of the 46 acres | Kept as open space permanently | Woods and trails, plus playing fields, recreation facilities, gardens, small parks |
| The strip between Route 135 and the aqueduct, about 6 acres | Kept wooded and natural | Forest, with invasive clearing and forestry care allowed |
| The remaining 40 or so acres | Enough kept as open space to reach the 50 percent floor, with no specific parcel named for it | Fields, trails or gardens on the open space share, and the rest left to the town's planning process |
So half the North 40 is protected as open space, but only about six acres are protected as woods. A soccer complex with a parking lot could count toward the open space half. The trail you walk on Saturday is open space too, and so is the vernal pool.
Why the other half was always going to come up
Town leaders have been making this point all fall. Barbara McMahon of the Community Preservation Committee told The Swellesley Report that it was "not the assumption" of the town that the other half "would just remain open space." At the October workshop, officials repeated that "the configuration was intended to evolve."
That change has come slowly. Before this fall, the last public meetings about developing the North 40 were eight years ago. COVID-19 stalled the work in 2020 and 2021. After that, the Select Board chose to "stay flexible to emerging needs," such as the 2024 construction of Hardy Elementary School. For more than a decade, the land's in-between state looked permanent, even though the agreement never made it so.
Where the fire station comes in
The current round of talks started at the Select Board's June 3 meeting. That's when the Wellesley Fire Department proposed two North 40 locations as possible sites for a new station. The department spent a year on the study with the firm Context Architecture, and the Select Board reviewed it on Sept. 15. It calls for replacing Station 1 in Wellesley Square, which is nearly 100 years old. It also proposes moving some operations and administrative staff out of Station 2 on Route 9 and into a new headquarters.
Both North 40 sites are along Weston Road. The study's site selection matrix is dated Aug. 3, 2026, and one of the criteria it scores is "Green Space Impact." The town has not yet published exactly where each site would sit on the parcel. Until it does, nobody can say whether either one would touch the purple-arrow loop, the gardens or the vernal pool. The study documents are on the town's Fire Station Master Plan page.
What 200 people glued onto a map on Oct. 1
The town's first big public session on the land was a hands-on design workshop called a charrette, held Oct. 1 at Wellesley High School. The Swellesley Report counted about 200 residents. Tables were given cutouts drawn to scale, showing fire stations, soccer fields, housing, gardens and other uses, and glued them onto a map of the 46 acres. Here's what came up across the room, in the paper's account:
- A fire station, with tables discussing where one could go and the problems each spot would raise
- Soccer fields, which led to questions about parking
- A bike lane through the property to keep cyclists off Weston Road
- A bike skills park of 5 to 7 acres, pitched by two Wellesley High ninth graders, with beginner, intermediate and advanced tracks and room for scooters
- Housing, with some advocates asking for senior housing or housing for adults with disabilities
- More gardens, which one current gardener summed up as "gardens, gardens, gardens"
- Nothing at all, written on one map as "Leave it all alone," or words to that effect
At one table, Don McCauley, who led the original purchase effort as a member of what was then the Board of Selectmen, answered questions about the rules that bar car cut-throughs between the property and Route 135.
Read that list next to the 2014 agreement. Fields, a bike park, gardens and trails all fit the agreement's definition of open space. A fire station and housing do not appear in that definition. The town has two halves of the parcel to plan, and different groups in the room were in effect bidding for each one.
Where things stand on Nov. 5
Nothing has been decided. At the workshop, Select Board Chair Marjorie Freiman said, pausing between each word, "Critically, no…site…has…been…chosen" for a new fire station. The town won't ask for money for a site feasibility study until at least Annual Town Meeting in the spring. Town records put that request at the 2027 Annual Town Meeting. A budget memo in the packet for the Select Board's Oct. 13 meeting sets aside $750,000 in free cash for fire station feasibility work in FY28, and notes that studying two sites would cost about $1.6 million. Neither that meeting's agenda nor the Oct. 27 agenda listed the North 40 as its own item. The Swellesley Report says to expect more chances for public input "in the weeks and months to come."
If you missed Oct. 1, the town's North 40 Property page has a 35-minute recording of the charrette. Meanwhile, the Turner Road entrance is open and the purple arrows still mark the loop out to the boardwalk. Garden applications open again in January.
At Rutledge Properties, we've followed the North 40 since the town bought it, and we'll keep tracking the meetings as the fire station study and the land-use talks move toward Town Meeting. If you'd like to talk through what's on the table, or just compare notes on the Weston Road trails, get in touch. We're happy to help.
