IN 1887, ELMER Judd traveled more than 1,500 miles by train, steamship and wagon from the Connecticut River to the Dakota plains, where he filed a claim on 160 acres.
His homestead overlapped the Prairie Potholes, a region of glacier-scooped ponds that make up a large chunk of the Western Hemisphere’s central flyway.
A coulee ran through one corner of his farm, providing Judd, an amateur ornithologist, with a place to study migratory birds as well as shoot ducks for dinner.
In 1917, Judd published a booklet documenting the avian species found in the Big Coulee, Turtle Mountains and Devils Lake region of North Dakota.
“He was known to have an interest in birds since childhood,” said Phyllis Schultz, Judd’s granddaughter.
Schultz, a Port Townsend resident, and her sister, Susan Bleed, have created a unique memorial to their grandfather and their family heritage by purchasing a piece of the Quimper Wildlife Corridor near Cook Avenue.
The corridor, which parallels the cliffs along the Strait of Juan de Fuca across the top of Quimper Peninsula, provides food, water and shelter from storms for birds migrating down the Pacific Flyway.
A refuge
“It offers refuge on a day like today,” Ron Sykes, a local ornithologist, said on the day of the first fall storm last week.
“Some migratory birds were probably blown down out there. That block of forest is a real haven for them.”
A survey by the Admiralty Audubon chapter found 120 species of birds in the wildlife corridor, and members have recorded 24 types of migratory songbirds: warblers, thrushes, finches and flycatchers, Sykes said.
The gift from Schultz and her sister was used by the Jefferson Land Trust to buy five acres east of Cook at Peary Avenue, adjacent to what was platted in the 1880s as a town square.
But instead of a fountain or statue where the streets meet, there’s a large granite rock in the woods that Schultz and her sister purchased as a memorial marker.
Deer visited the site after the rock was installed in June, and a winter wren provided background music for the dedication ceremony, attended by three generations of Elmer Judd’s descendants.
“The Judd family legacy provided us with a really significant piece of what we needed to acquire,” Sarah Spaeth, land trust director, said at the June 23 dedication.
The family’s plot is in what is called the Winona Basin, one of six wetlands in the corridor, which follows the natural drainage channel that originates near Frog Hill Farm off Hastings Avenue and drains eastward into the lagoon at Fort Worden.
Some of the land is in public ownership, including an 80-acre block known as the western reserve.
West of Jacob Miller Road, it is owned by the Department of Natural Resources and is popular with hikers.
The west end of the corridor, south of Middlepoint Road, has houses on it but is protected with a conservancy agreement.
Another 50 acres around Tibbals Lake is protected by covenants, but the area between the fairgrounds and Cook is still in 100-foot-by-50-foot lots that were platted by town founders in the 1880s.
They are now owned by people who bought them in the 1970s, Spaeth said.
Some are for sale, some are not, with the value depending on proximity to civilization.
To the east of the wildlife corridor are the wooded acres called Cappy’s Trails, which have been the subject of preservationists’ efforts.
‘Follows the water’
“Their focus is on trails and buffers,” Spaeth said. “The wildlife corridor follows the water, the low path, on the 100-year floodplain.”
It was after the family farm in North Dakota was sold in 2001 that Schultz started thinking about creating a memorial to her grandfather, who died in 1941.
She was born and raised on the farm he established north of Cando, N.D., about 40 miles from the Canadian border.
On the farm, which had grown to 640 acres, Schultz fed chickens, stacking hay and herding cattle.
After graduating from nursing school in North Dakota, she flew off to Chicago to work, then to Atlanta with her mate, Bob Schultz, where they both taught at Emory University.
In 1989, the Schultzes moved to Seattle to teach at the University of Washington, retiring in 1997, when they moved to Port Townsend.
Local agriculture
Phyllis Schultz’s interest in helping local farmers led her to the Washington State University Extension office to ask what the community was doing to support local agriculture.
“There was something about the intensity of her voice, how she spoke, how much she cared for her family farm, that triggered a new initiative, “said Katherine Baril, former director.
What Schultz triggered was a survey by the land trust, the county conservation district and WSU to find out what local farmers need and what could be done to grow the local food economy, Baril said.
The survey resulted in the creation of the Olympic Fresh Map, identifying more than 50 small farms.
From there, WSU hired Harv Singh to help the farmers market, and WSU started the Farm Tour, Baril said.
When Schultz learned about the land trust’s efforts to buffer the Winona Wetlands in the Quimper Wildlife Corridor, she saw parallels with her grandfather’s interests in birds.
She also wanted to honor her family’s 375 years of farming in America.
Elmer Judd was the first of his family to come out West, but the Judd family migration started in 1633, when Thomas Judd sailed from England to join the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In an oral family history Schultz has recorded, she tells about how Thomas, his wife and two children followed the Great Trail that led from the coast inland to the Connecticut River.
The Judds settled in Hartford, then Farmington, where Thomas established Judd’s Farm on 200 acres.
Thomas’ son, Philip, for whom Phyllis is named, moved west to Bethel, Conn.
Six generations
“They farmed there for six generations,” Schultz said.
Schultz’s parents, Percy and Rea Judd, continued to run the North Dakota farm, raising wheat and cattle, but neither Phyllis, Susan nor their two cousins followed the family tradition.
At the time of the sale, much of the land had been put into wetland conservation easements, providing rest and food for migrating birds like it did in Elmer’s lifetime.
“It was the last land to be called Judd’s Farm in America,” Schultz said.
Schultz is planning to place copies of the Judd family records in the Cando Pioneer Museum and the State Library of Connecticut, where restoration efforts have returned many areas in the state where her family came to roost back to wooded habitat.
The Jefferson Land Trust offers guided walks of the Quimper Wildlife Corridor on the first Saturday of the month at 10 a.m.
For more information, visit www.saveland.org or phone 360-379-9501.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
