Congressman Rush Holt and Hopewell Valley officials and business leaders cut the ceremonial ribbon to officially open the Pennington Connection to the Lawrence Hopewell Trail July 7.
The connection was made possible through a grant secured by Holt and through Bristol-Myers Squibb’s construction of an additional quarter mile of trail linking the existing trail on Pennington Rocky Hill Road to the new section going into Pennington Borough.
LHT is made up of more than 20 miles of biking and walking trail looping through Hopewell and Lawrence Township. It is the creation of a grassroots collaboration formed in 2002.
Access from Pennington Borough to LHT was made possible with the completion of what is called the Pennington Connection. The connection was proposed by the borough to link King George Road on Pennington’s border with the nearby LHT along Pennington-Rocky Hill Road. The project was completed in two phases.
The first phase, from the Stony Brook Bridge through a large wetland area, was constructed last year and funded largely through federal grants to Pennington Borough. The first phase features a 600-foot-long retaining wall with railing. The concrete retaining wall was necessary because of a sharp drop off in grade along the west side of Pennington-Rocky Hill Road. The was a major contributor to project cost of $456, 929.
The main source of funding for the first phase was a $266,760 federal grant secured with the assistance of Congressman Holt in 2009. Pennington Borough obtained a second grant of $24,700 through the federally funded Recreational Trails grant program. The balance of funding was provided by the Borough’s Open Space Trust Fund; the fund is supported by the borough’s 1 cent open space tax.
During the spring, Bristol-Myers Squibb extended the trail on its Pennington-Rocky Hill Road frontage from Old Mill Road in Hopewell Township south toward Kind George Road in Pennington to complete the connection.
LHT now traverses the full length of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s property on Pennington-Rocky Hill Road, linking with LHT segments on Wargo Road and at the neighboring Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed to the west, Mercer Meadows Park to the east, and the Pennington Connection to the south.
More information is online at lhtrail.org.
