The forest around 23 Potter Road carries about 89 deer per square mile. The surrounding countryside carries about 34. Those figures are estimates from Connecticut DEEP's 2025 management plan for James L. Goodwin State Forest. The plan also notes that hunting is not permitted at Goodwin, and it names oak resilience as "a critically important objective" for the current planning cycle.
DEEP's response is a wall of brush about ten feet tall, built from wood cut on site. The first material on the state's list is oaks that spongy moth already killed. This month, people who walk Goodwin can stand at a planned wall site on one Saturday and see a four-year-old wall the next.
A forest that can't replace its oaks
The trouble at Goodwin started before the deer arrived in force. The 2025–2035 management plan describes oak die-offs driven by spongy moth defoliation, drought and other stressors. It also describes a "general lack of oak reproduction" in parts of the forest. Where the oak canopy has thinned, black birch and red maple fill in underneath and keep young oaks from moving up.
The oaks still produce acorns. The plan points to a good red oak acorn crop in 2021. Turkeys and deer eat many of the acorns before they sprout, though, and deer browse the seedlings that make it past winter snow depth. Small openings and light cutting end up favoring black birch, red maple and other trees deer don't eat as readily.
So opening the canopy is not enough on its own. Cutting creates the light young oaks need, and at Goodwin's deer density that light also feeds the deer. The fix has to keep deer out of a harvested area long enough for the new trees to grow past their reach.
What DEEP is asking a logger to build
The plan commits DEEP Forestry to "initiate the installation of a slash wall around the perimeter of an appropriate commercial harvest" during this planning cycle. It frames the project as part of Goodwin's mission as an education and demonstration forest.
DEEP has since put out a sale that includes the wall. The bid packet for timber sale E-1112 covers about 36 acres in Compartments 23 and 24, south of Middle Road. That stretch sits over the town line in Chaplin, though Goodwin's address and conservation center are in Hampton. The sale lists 83,488 board feet of oak sawtimber and 199 cords of mixed hardwood poletimber.
The packet's work requirements spell out the wall.
"The buyer shall construct a 2,400-foot-long slash wall, measuring approximately 20-feet wide at the base, 10-feet tall, and dense enough to prohibit deer from entering the area."
The terms also say where the wood should come from. Most of it has to be cut within 150 feet of the wall line, which the state's monitoring forester marks with paint. The packet lists three preferred materials, in this order:
- Standing dead oaks killed by spongy moth, marked with slashes
- Poletimber marked for removal, also marked with slashes
- Tops left over from the harvested sawlog trees
DEEP expects the wall to take about 200 cords of wood and no more than 280. The buyer also has to work with DEEP on a gate-like opening so staff can get in and out once the wall is finished.
The terms protect a few things walkers will care about. The buyer may not use blazed recreational trails as harvest roads. Stone walls are to be left undisturbed, with no brush or tops piled on them. Marked dead trees that pose a hazard to trails are to be felled and lopped.
The packet ties payments to cut acreage. One-third is due before harvest begins and no later than August 3, 2026. The next third is due once 12 acres are cut, no later than November 6, 2026. The balance is due once 24 acres are cut, no later than April 16, 2027. The listed expiration date is December 17, 2027. The bid packet doesn't say when the wall will be built, or confirm that the sale has been awarded. As of mid-October 2026, the Goodwin wall should be treated as planned, not finished.
Why a pile of brush stops a deer
Slash walls started at Cornell University's Arnot Forest. Goodwin's plan says more than a dozen have been built in New England and New York since 2017. Cornell Cooperative Extension's slash wall layout guide explains why the dimensions in the Goodwin packet look the way they do.
Arnot builds its walls at least ten feet tall, measured to a two-inch stem. Reaching that height usually leaves a base a little over twenty feet wide. The walls settle 8 to 14 percent a year, or up to 15 inches, depending on how dense they are and what went into them. Fine, rot-prone material sinks faster than coarse, durable wood.
The guide treats height as less important than the bottom few feet. A wall that has settled well below its original height can still work if the base is dense and wide enough that deer don't try to jump or climb it. Deer tunnel where they can, so Arnot crews lay pole-sized stems, 5 to 10 inches across and larger, along the ground first, then pile tops and limbs on top. That fits the order in the Goodwin packet. Standing dead oaks and marked poletimber come first because they make the solid base. Sawlog tops fill in above.
Goodwin's plan estimates a slash wall keeps deer out for roughly 8 to 10 years after a harvest. That is enough time for young trees to grow past browse height. The plan puts average cost at $283 per harvest acre.
What the early numbers show
The best regional evidence comes from five slash walls built between 2020 and 2023. Four are in Connecticut, at North Madison, Seymour, Nepaug and Granby, and one is in Oakham, Massachusetts. Researchers who published results in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research in April 2025 tracked stump sprouts at 160 sample points covering 1,509 trees.
| Measure | Inside the walls | Outside the walls |
|---|---|---|
| Red oak, mean sprout height after two growing seasons | 1.8 m | 0.7 m |
| Sugar maple, mean sprout height after two growing seasons | 2.0 m | 0.3 m |
| Red oak stumps with a live sprout after one year | 56% | 28% |
| Shagbark hickory stumps with a live sprout after one year | 77% | 55% |
Red maple and tulip poplar sprouted at high rates either way, at 78 percent and 87 percent. Deer pressure is what tips a cut stand away from oak and hickory and toward those species. The study found the gap in sprout survival inside and outside the walls grew during the second year. These are one- and two-season results, so they show a strong start rather than a mature forest. Goodwin's plan describes its own wall as an experiment it will use to study outcomes.
Two Saturdays, two stages of the same idea
The Eastern Connecticut Forest Landowners Association and CT DEEP Forestry are running a two-part program for The Last Green Valley's Walktober. The parts are a week apart and show two stages of a wall's life.
| Part 1 | Part 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Saturday, October 17, 2026 | Saturday, October 24, 2026 |
| Time | 10 a.m. to noon | 10 a.m. to noon |
| Where | 23 Potter Road, Hampton, at Goodwin State Forest | 101 Aldrich Road, Putnam, on private land |
| Led by | DEEP Forester Daniel Evans | Forest landowner Scott Moorehead |
| What you see | A planned slash wall site at Goodwin | Connecticut's first completed, working slash wall, finished four years ago |
The Last Green Valley listing for Part 1 rates the walk moderate, welcomes leashed pets and asks visitors to follow the parking signs. ECFLA's events page asks attendees to email [email protected] if they plan to come. It describes the Putnam site as showing regeneration free of deer browse.
The same October 17 morning at Goodwin also has a mushroom identification walk with professional forager Karen Monger and the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History. It also runs 10 a.m. to noon at 23 Potter Road. Both are listed for the same time and place, so confirm with the organizers whether they overlap before choosing one.
The rest of a forest-heavy week in Hampton
The slash wall dates fall in a week when a lot of Hampton's October calendar is outdoors or close to it.
- Sunday, October 18, 4 p.m.: Hampton Congregational Church's tracker organ concert with organist Cecily DeMarco, by free-will offering, as listed in the October Hampton Gazette.
- Monday, October 19, 4 to 5:30 p.m.: Tales of Hampton Station, an easy railroad-history walk on the Air Line State Park Trail with the Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum. It starts where 11th Section Road meets Estabrooks Road.
- Saturday, October 24, 7 to 9 p.m.: Ghostly Tales from Hampton and Beyond, local legends told by Hampton storytellers, with free parking at the Community Center and the Town Hall next door. It falls on the same day as the Putnam wall visit.
To walk the forest on your own, Goodwin is open daily from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset. The Air Line State Park Trail has a trailhead lot on Potter Road, 0.6 mile north of Route 6, inside Goodwin. The Friends of Goodwin Forest note that the conservation center and museum are open part-time, so call ahead before planning a visit there.
The E-1112 packet sets cutting milestones through April 2027 and lists an expiration date of December 2027. If the wall goes up as specified, it will stand south of Middle Road as a band of dead oak, poletimber and treetops about 20 feet wide and close to half a mile long.
Old stone walls, mature oaks and forest edges come up in nearly every Hampton home I walk through. When a buyer or seller asks what's happening in the woods around a property, I'd rather give a real answer than a guess. If you own wooded land in Hampton and want to talk through what your trees, walls and acreage mean when it's time to make a move, Lindsey Niarhakos is a direct call or email away. Let's Connect.
