Mission and History

In 1926 the Egler family came to Norfolk, Connecticut from Brooklyn, New York, and purchased the Stenman Farm and 200 acres on North Colebrook Road for their son Frank who suffered from asthma. The existing Finnish barn was remodeled as a summer home. Later it was turned into a year-round home with an interior in the style of a Brooklyn brownstone.

Frank began the first of his “Naturalization studies” at the age of 16 when he transplanted a Pink Phlox onto the property. Studies were continued over the years with over 2000 separate plantings of over 600 introduced taxa have been set out into the established plant communities of AF. Frank and his family acquired additional abutting acreage over time, farm fields and some woods, and allowed the forest to continue to take over the fields.
 
In 1945, Frank retired from teaching and moved to Norfolk full-time. He began to envision AF as a small, volunteer, long-term scientific research station. The first AF publications were annual reports on experiments appearing in 1947 in the Journals of Forestry and Ecology, and The Botanical Gazette from 1947-1952. During this time Frank became a leading authority on the effects of herbicides and ecologically sound vegetation management of rights-of-way. In due course he published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles on these subjects, and another 300 articles on related subjects in science and ecology. He was a vigorous correspondent with ecologists of the day.

In the early 1960s he corresponded with the environmentalist Rachel Carson and was a significant influence on her writing of Chapter 6, “The Earth’s Green Mantle” of the historic book Silent Spring. See Frank Egler and Rachel Carson. She in turn influenced his thinking on pesticides and progress in the field of ecology.
 
Aton Forest was formed in 1962 as a private field station of 650 acres, when it began to publish annual communications and an annotated bibliography of Egler’s monographs. It was relaunched as a non-profit and Natural Area Preserve organization in 1990.

In the early 1960s Dr. Egler was active in the creation of another Natural Area Preserve in the south of Norfolk, the 1000 acre wild land Spaulding Pond Preserve, established and protected by Happy Kitchel of Greenwich, Connecticut. She would later become his wife in 1968. For half the year they lived in North Norfolk and for the other half in South Norfolk. Happy Kitchel died of cancer in 1978.  Frank refers to his decade with Happy as the “happiest” years of his life.
 
A passion for wild land protection ran deep in the Kitchel family. In 1961, Happy’s mother, Helen Binny Kitchel gave 600 acres, the Kitchel Wilderness, a state-designated Natural Area Preserve (NAP) forever protected from logging, to the Algonquin State Forest in Colebrook, CT. The Spaulding Pond Preserve was the creation of Happy Kitchel and continues to this day with AF holding the conservation easement on what is now more than a 985 acre preserve. After 1978 when she gave the property to the Connecticut River Conservancy, Dr. Egler maintained a keen eye on the Spaulding Pond Preserve and contributed property to it in the decades before he died in 1996.
 
AF now stewards 2,459 acres in Semi-Managed and Wild conserved lands. It currently owns 1,463 acres in total, of which 1,157 are under conservation restriction. It holds conservation restrictions over 997 acres, the bulk of which are in the Spaulding Pond Preserve, which AF is currently seeking to acquire fee ownership of, in partnership with a local partner as holder of an amended and restated conservation restriction.
 
Aton Forest, Inc. was granted 501(c)(3) non-profit status in 1990 to help protect the lands of AF in perpetuity and to carry out Frank Egler’s desired “long-term, low-cost, low-impact” research of forest succession. AF is registered as a Biological Field Station (BFS), is designated as an Important Bird Area (IBA), and owns four houses in North Norfolk.

We welcome scientific researchers, ecology historians, and educational and professional groups to our preserves by prior arrangement. The related Aton Forest Fellowship, a scientific research fellowship, was established in 1981 and currently supports one research fellow studying leaf-miners and insects. The 501(c)(3) supports other research, There is limited public access to two Interpretive Trails in our Preserves. We host educational and community events. We will celebrate our 100th anniversary in 2026.