20 June 1859 – 26 June 1859

River, on account of rain, some two feet above summer level. Great purple fringed orchis. What that colored-flowered locust in Deacon Farrar’s yard and house this side Lincoln?

Tuesday. P. M.—To Derby’s pasture behind and beyond schoolhouse. Meadow-sweet. Hedge-hyssop out. In that little pool near the Assabet, above our bath-place there, Glycerza pallida well out in waterand Carex lagopodioides just beginning. That grass covering dry and dryish fields and hills, with curled or convolute radical leaves, is apparently Festuca ovina, and not Danthonia as I thought it. It is now generally conspicuous. Are any of our simpler forms the F’. tenella ? * You see now the Eupatoreum purpureum pushing up in rank masses in the low grounds, and the lower part of the uppermost leaves, forming a sort of cup, is-con- spicuously purplish.

Paddle up the river to Lee’s, measuring the bridges. | The sun coming out at intervals to-day, after a long rainy and cloudy spell in which the weeds have grown much, I observe that the rough goldenrods and one other, which have grown one to two feet high, have many of them in various parts of the town immediately drooped their tops, hanging down five or six inches. This weed appears to be particularly tender in this respect, having probably grown very rapidly in the rain. Comara palustris, how long? Scirpus lacustris is freshly out. I notice a black willow top a foot above water, a dozen rods from shore, near the outlet of Fair Haven Pond, or just off the point of the Island, where the water is ten feet deep by my measure, and it is alive and green. Yet one who was not almost daily on the river would not perceive this revolution constantly going on. Only in very few cases ' can I discover where the surface has been taken up, since the water stands over and conceals the scar till it is healed, and for similar reasons it is hard to tell what is a fresh deposit and what an old growth. I should say that the largest masses, or islands, of button-bushes standing in the meadows had drifted there. Even the owner of the meadow and the haymakers may not always detect what was imported thus the previous spring, these transplanted plants look so at home there. So the revolution is almost an imperceptible one. Many seeing the green willow-tops rising above the surface in deep water think that there is a rock there on which they grow. There is a very large mass of bushes thus moved on the right shore, some way above Sherman’s Bridge, and a large mass above Heard’s Bridge some distance, on the east side (having drifted across). I hear now that snapping sound under the pads, or probably as soon as the pads are thickly spread over the surface. Also I hear it made by a fish darting to the surface in midstream where are no weeds, —a dry, snapping sound.

Ride to Wayland, surveying the bridges. Veiny-leaved hawkweed freshly out. At Heard’s Bridge the white maple is the prevailing one, and I do not notice a red one there nor at Bridle Point Bridge. I think I saw the white as far down as the Sudbury causeway.’ A foggy, Cape-Cod day, with an easterly wind.

To Billerica dam, surveying the bridges. Another foggy [szc], amounting from time to time to a fine rain, and more, even to a shower, though the grass was thickly covered with cobwebs in the morning. Yet 1859) THE DAM CONTROVERSY 211 it was a condensed fog, I should say. Its value ap- peared to be as a veil to protect the tender vegetation after the long rainy and cloudy weather. The 22d, 23d, and 24th, I have been surveying the bridges and river from Heard’s Bridge to the Billerica dam. I hear of two places in Wayland where there was formerly what was called a hay bridge, but no causeway, at some narrow and shallow place, a hun- dred years ago or more. Have looked after all the swift and the shallow places also. The testimony of the farmers, etc., is that the river thirty to fifty years ago was much lower in the summer than now. Deacon Richard Heard spoke of playing when a boy on the river side of the bushes where the pads are, and of wading with great ease at Heard’s Bridge, and I hear that one Rice (of Wayland or Sud- bury), an old man, remembers galloping his horse through the meadows to the edge of the river. The meadow just above the causeway on the Wayland side was spoken of as particularly valuable. Colonel David Heard, who accompanied me and is best acquainted of any with the details of the controversy, — has worked at clearing out the river (I think about 1820), —said that he did not know of a rock in the river from the falls near the Framingham line to perhaps the rear of Hubbard’s in Concord. The grass not having been cut last year, the ice in the spring broke off great quantities of pipes, etc., Immense masses of them, which were floated and drifted down against the causeways and bridges; and there they lie still, almost concealing any green grass, like a raft on the meadows, along the south side the causeways. The inhabitants of Wayland used a good deal for mulching trees. One told me that at Sherman’s Bridge they stretched quite across the river above the bridge, so that a man “could walk across on them,” — perhaps “did walk across on them,” — but on inquiring of one who lived by the bridge I learned that “a dog could not have walked across on them.” | Daniel Garfield, whom I met fishing on the river, and who has worked on Nine-Acre Corner and Lee’s Bridges for fifty years or more, could remember one year when Captain Wheeler dug much mud from the river, when the water was so low that he could throw out pickerel on each side outside the bushes (where the pads now are). Says that his old master with whom he lived in Lincoln when he was young told him that he wheeled the first barrow-load at the building of Lee’s Bridge and road, and that if he were alive now he would be a good deal over a hundred years old. Yet Shattuck says that bridge was a new bridge in 1660. Ebenezer Conant remembers when the Canal dam was built, and that before that it used to be dry at midsummer outside the bushes on each side. Lee says that about 1819 the bridge near him was rebuilt and the mud-sills taken up. These are said to remain sound an indefinite while. When they put in a new pile (Buttrick the carpenter tells me) they find the mortise in the mud-sill and place it in that. Deacon Farrar says that he can remember Lee’s Bridge seventy- five years ago, and that it was not a new bridge then. That it is sometimes obstructed by hay in the spring. That he has seen a chip go faster up-stream there than ever down. His son said this was the case considerably further up in the meadows toward Rice’s, and he thought it the effect of Stow River backing up. Deacon Farrar thought the hay bridge called Far- rar’s Bridge was for foot-passengers only. I found the water in Fair Haven Pond on the 22d twelve to thirteen feet deep in what I thought the chan- nel, but in Purple Utricularia Bay, half a dozen rods from the steep hill, twenty-two and a half feet was the most I found. John Hosmer tells me that he aalivcae Major Hosmer’s testifying that the South Bridge was carried up-stream, before the court, at the beginning of the controversy. Simonds of Bedford, who is measuring the rapidity of the current at Carlisle Bridge, says that a board with a string attached ran off there one hundred yards in fifteen minutes at the height of water (in May, and pretty high), when the Commissioners were here. That he has found it to be swiftest just after the water has begun to fall. The character of the river valley changes about at Hill’s Bridge. The meadows are quite narrow and of a different character, — higher and firmer, —a long hill bounds the meadow, and almost the river, on the west for a good way, and high land on the east, and the bottom is harder and said to be often rocky (? ). The water was about four and a half feet deep — sounded with a paddle and guessed at — at the Ford- way, and at that stage so swift and strong that you could not row a boat against it in the swiftest part of the falls."

Sunday. P. M. — Up Assabet. The black willow down is now quite conspicuous on the trees, giving them a parti-colored or spotted white and green look, quite interesting, like a fruit. It also rests on the water by the sides of the stream, where caught by alders, etc., in narrow crescents ten and five feet long, at right angles with the bank, so thick and white as to remind me of a dense mass of hoar-frost crystals.