Hartford Courant, September 12, 2010
Glancing at a map or driving along highways and back roads, it quickly becomes obvious that Connecticut is bejeweled with lakes and ponds. Glistening in the sun or mirroring a cloudy sky, they infuse urban and wooded areas alike with space and light. They beckon to us for a swim, paddle, or simple relaxation and
contemplation from the shore. No doubt they are one of the state’s most valued natural resources. “A lake,” as Thoreau remarked, “is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye.”
But what at first blush seems a gift of nature has much to do with human tinkering. Many of our lakes and ponds are artificial impoundments largely developed out of economic necessity for industrial and commercial purposes. Our largest lake, Candlewood, whose dendritic arms and bays lap at hillsides in five towns, was created to produce electricity. Even Bantam Lake in Litchfield and Morris, our biggest natural water body, has been augmented by a dam.
Lakes and ponds of all sizes were commonly created from the eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries by damming rivers and streams and harnessing the power of falling water to spin water wheels and later turbines. From the earliest European settlement, many communities developed grist and saw mills. Later, the water powered machinery producing everything from pins and axes to clocks, twine and cloth. Water bodies that today are cherished for their beauty and ecological attributes were the economic lifeblood of the state. “It would be difficult to conceive,” the Connecticut Supreme Court noted in 1866, “a greater public benefit than garnering up the waste waters of innumerable streams and rivers and ponds and lakes, and compelling them with a gigantic energy to turn machinery and drive mills, and thereby build up cities and villages, and extend the business, the wealth, the population and prosperity of the state.”
Our lakes and ponds still provide valuable products like water and electricity, but most people today connect to them with lakeside homes, picnics, fishing, swimming, boating, skiing, skating, wildlife watching, and shoreline walking. Few realize the man-influenced origins of these impoundments though their genesis is sometimes betrayed by names such as Paper Mill Pond, or by long, narrow shapes mimicking drowned river valleys like Aspinook Pond on the Quinebaug River and Lake Zoar on the Housatonic.
Some rivers have been repeatedly dammed into a series of bulging reservoirs that seem like tokens on the strand of a charm bracelet. The Pachaug River in eastern Connecticut, for one, includes Beachdale, Glasgo, Pachaug, Hopeville, and Ashland Ponds. Most impoundments, however, were created by damming small streams and spring fed swamps. Some became the centerpiece of public parks, like Burr Pond in Torrington which was created in 1851 to power three sawmills and later attracted factories, including that of Gail Borden, inventor of condensed milk. Many, like Lake Williams in Lebanon, remain private, their development following a familiar pattern.
Lake Williams was created for a saw and then a grist mill in 1816, according to Town Historian Alicia Wayland. By the 1860s, the water was controlled by a textile firm several miles downstream. In the twentieth century, a summer hotel was established to take advantage of the lake’s beauty, and after the Second World War house lots were sold, most often as summer places that in time were converted to year around use. Along the wooded shore today is a campground, spa, and many private homes.
As impoundments, many of our lakes and ponds are particularly fragile. Because they are often shallow and supported by large watersheds to ensure ready water, they are especially subject to filling with sediment, pollution from runoff and sewage, and choking by invasive weeds. If dams are not maintained, the water bodies may disappear altogether. Such was the case with Greenwoods Pond along the Farmington River in New Hartford, a one-and-a-quarter-mile long, half-mile wide lake built for industrial power and used for swimming, skating, fishing and boating. After nearly a hundred years, the dam failed in a 1936 storm and was never rebuilt. From atop the broken dam today, all that remains is a meadow rapidly growing up in trees.
Realizing that our lakes and ponds are frequently a partnership between man and nature not only evokes fascinating stories enlarging our sense of place, it should heighten our awareness of the need to care for them. If we prize their role in our landscape, we can ill afford to let their maintenance slide like so much water over the dam.
