Your Local Land Trust
Catoctin Land Trust collaborates with private landowners who want to voluntarily protect and preserve their land through conservation easements. We work with other and trust partners to protect working farmland and land with significant natural, scenic, and historic values. They do this through conservation easements.
A conservation easement is a voluntary contract between a landowner and a land trust, government agency, or qualified organization in which the owner places permanent restrictions on the future uses of some or all of their property to protect scenic, wildlife, water, or agricultural resources.
Easements are tailored to meet the needs of each landowner. The landowner still owns the property and can use it, sell it, or leave it to heirs, but the restrictions of the easement stay with the land forever. Conservation easements also can protect rivers and streams — including drinking water downstream — when landowners choose to add these practices to their easement.
Since 2002, when CLT obtained IRS designation as a tax-exempt organization, we have protected over 2,200 acres from development, forever preserving the historical, ecological, agricultural, and scenic resources of these lands.