Reprieve for Peter Rabbit

"Now and then Farmer Brown will frown on the old briar patch and call it wasteland and threaten to clear away all the bushes and trees," wrote Author Thornton Burgess in 1947, in "The Old Briar Patch." But in the end Farmer Brown always decided to save the patch -- and so last week did the town of Sandwich, Mass. (pop. 5,000). By unanimous vote, the 800 citizens decided to spend $200,000 to buy up 57 acres of meadows, ponds and forest, including the five acres of bull and cat briars that har bored such Burgess creatures as Reddy Fox, Bobby Coon, Jimmy Skunk and, of course, Peter Rabbit.

The people of Sandwich were fear ful that real estate developers might have plowed under the old patch and constructed more of the motels and quick-food outlets that already blight much of Cape Cod. Farmer Brown's son would have approved. When his father grew doubtful about preserving the patch, the boy would remind him: "It is the safest place anywhere for some of our most useful friends in fur and feathers. You know it is."

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