The Hopkinton Land Trust protects 132 acres within the 822-acre Canonchet Brook Preserve, a large, healthy forest protected and co-managed in partnership with The Nature Conservancy. This extensive woodland lies near the Rhode Island–Connecticut border and safeguards the headwaters of Canonchet Brook and Tomaquag Brook—tributaries to the federally designated Wood-Pawcatuck Wild and Scenic River. The preserve features a rugged landscape of boulders, rocky outcrops, and swampy lowlands. Towering oaks and tulip trees form a high canopy that provides habitat for a wide variety of songbirds and other wildlife.

Canonchet Brook is part of the traditional homeland of the Narragansett, Mohegan, and Pequot peoples. Canonchet was a Narragansett sachem who resisted English and colonial authority and was captured and executed in 1676 during King Philip’s War. Today, the preserve and surrounding forest contain some of the best examples of Indigenous and colonial-era stonework in Rhode Island—fragile traces of thousands of years of human history on this landscape.