Island Hop Our Watershed
BY DON DOUCETTE
Gretel Ehrlich said it best and I tend to agree, “Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.” Thus, my feelings of anticipation for new horizon experiences whenever aboard a ferry lingering at a mooring, either about to arrive or depart…or, as I was once able, locally within my own canoe exploring the nooks and crannies of our local watershed.
I love islands.
Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook recently completed an annual cleaning of the Dodge Island Cemetery within Dodgeville Pond (Prosperity Lake) here in Attleboro or more specifically, an Industrial Era impoundment of the Ten Mile River which once supplied water power to the local Dodgeville Mill.
A result of which this year, I have begun a mental inventory of islands related to the Ten Mile River Watershed – some influenced by human alterations in the past and some occurring naturally.
Dodge Island I suspect was once solid land prior to the damming of the Ten Mile River.
Two curious tandem outcroppings above Falls Pond Dam in North Attleboro are most worthy for local island consideration. Again, a result of creating Falls Pond, their names are unknown to me and I think of these little islands as the Red Rock Dumplings – the signature red rock so typical of the greater North Attleboro community.
There is the linear island at Slater Park in Pawtucket, the result years ago of early mill activities and during more recent years, included in the public park environment offered as the popular Slater Park public estate, once the working multi-generational Daggett Family farm.
And…the stately wooded island within the Turner Reservoir in East Providence and for want of an official name at this writing, I reference as Shadbush Island as prior to the flowering and leafing of our local oak forests, this island shadbush community displays lovely white lacy blooms of note. Again, this island was once most likely solid land, but for the prior damming of the Ten Mile River.
And a special natural island which included a number of personal arrivals and departures via canoe which we referred to as Beech Island located upriver off Holden Street in Attleboro and well within the Bungay River complex.
Often we put into this tiny island and admired the clustered beech tree stand and walked its limited natural surface surrounded by sound absorbing wetland, the New York-to-Boston rail being so close – we’d pick and bag the usual amount of trash and reluctantly leave this tiny heap of natural treed-gravel deposited by the last great Wisconsin Glacier.
Herein is a short list of Ten Mile River Watershed islands. Put on your thinking caps dear reader, might other Ten Mile River Watershed islands be unaccounted at this point? I welcome your verbal contributions of island related thoughts and anticipations.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”