TEN MILE RIVER RAMBLES
BY DON DOUCETTE
O’Neil Boulevard in Attleboro was once called the Speedway as local industrialists previously exercised and raced horses there.
There once existed there a visible land feature referred to as Speedway Brook with its associated floodplain/wetlands – all gone now filled for East Attleboro industrial expansion and eventually as factories blossomed, the rapid building of much needed working class housing i.e. the three deckers commonly associated with Attleboro’s East Side community.
Topographic elevations within the East Side neighborhood were flattened and the Speedway Brook environ filled while its associated waters were culverted toward a visible Maple Street outflow into Thacher Brook.
Try to find the Seedway Brook today and where was/is its actual headwater?
There is presently water flowing beneath Eddy Street off Forest Street…not toward Speedway Brook as one might assume, but rather in an opposite direction with the only logical assumption being toward the Taunton River.
Come the dawning today that the Taunton River Watershed actually exists only several city blocks away from the Attleboro Common – and lost to the obscurity of time in the vicinity of Forest Street and Emory Street exists a natural division of two watersheds i.e. the Ten Mile River Watershed and the Taunton River Watershed.
Go to Eddy Square today and you will be standing within the Taunton River Watershed – wander close by toward Park Street and in that developmental jumble exists the long lost Speedway Brook headwater culverted presently in obscurity as a tiny tributary within the Ten Mile River Watershed system.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”