Leonhard Farm Trail

The hundreds of drivers who now pass it each day see a bucolic farm first started by one of the town’s founding families and perhaps little changed from colonial days.

The famous Hubbard Elm grew on the Foster Homestead, one of the earliest settlers in North Andover. The homestead later became the estate of J.M. Hubbard. The tree was 300 years old and 30 feet in circumference when it blew down in a storm in 1924.

Except for the goldenrod, New England asters, and native trees growing on its fringes, this farm land would not have been familiar to the Indigenous people who lived in this area. They would have been familiar with the American elm. Its bark and phloem had important medicinal uses.

More than half of the property is mapped as having Prime and State Important Farmland Soils—designations reserved for the most productive soils in the country.

While much of the property remains an active farm, Greenbelt and the Friends of North Andover Trails created a public trail from Bruin Hill Road through the Leonhards’ woodlands in North Andover and Boxford, offering scenic views of the freshwater wetland, forest, and historic granite markers on the North Andover/Boxford boundary.

The land harbors a diversity of important wildlife habitat, from wetlands to upland forest, supporting such species as deer, coyote, foxes, raptors and songbirds. Wetlands are significant for rare wildlife, and also contribute to the headwaters of the Ipswich River.