East Hampton was settled in 1648 around what Lion Gardiner described as “a mere swamp or morass” — not a pond, but a spring. The colonists pulled bushes from the swamp and cartloads of mud to use as fertilizer. The sunken aspect of the Village Green, from Pudding Hill up to the flagpole at Buell Lane, still follows the contours of this old swamp and the colonial-era excavation for fertilizer. In 1653, “the Spring” was “diged”: Ralph Dayton and Thomas Baker were deputized to dig out the swamp, creating Town Pond (and a better source of fresh water). It was the heart of the town. The founding families’ plots branched out from around it.
Town Pond is part of a much larger natural drainage basin that extends underground from Hook Pond, west to the Village Green, then north, beyond Hook Mill and the present-day Long Island Rail Road tracks, with tributaries as far as Round Swamp. Observers from colonial times up until today have noted that when there is heavy rain or melting snow, especially when the ground is frozen, this underground watercourse rises through this entire interconnected waterway, making the ground squishy not just on the Village Green but in the “dreen” at the north end, between what is now North Main Street and Accabonac Highway. I know this is true, because I used to live on Accabonac, and my toilet would overflow after a storm.
For 300 years, residents have complained about the pond’s turbid appearance. When it held water, it was green and murky. When the water was low, it was “a mud bog.” In the 19th century, people called it “the Goose Pond.” Geese from the surrounding farmsteads would congregate there, gossiping and dropping waste, and it was considered a bit pestiferous. Buttonwood trees grew around it. The first recorded complaint about green algae covering the surface appeared in The Star in 1887. Complaints about green algae would probably have hit print sooner, but the newspaper was only founded in 1885.
The second recorded beautification attempt at Town Pond (after the digging of Dayton and Baker) came in 1877, when Mrs. Jeffreys of Jeffreys Lane charitably planted weeping willows — the height of chic in Victorian times, when all things mournful were in fashion — on its banks. Sometimes, in hot summer, it dried out altogether. In the summer of 1893, an elderly resident lamented in a long letter to The Star that while in his boyhood the pond had extended from Pudding Hill all the way to Mill Hill, it was presently little more than a mud bog. He was also distressed by talk around town that the pond was going to be filled in and made into a formal park with hedges, statuary, and ornamental shrubbery. Thomas Moran, the artist, was so concerned about rumors of a formalized park transformation that he piped rainwater from his own rooftop across Main Street and into the pond.
In November 1895, the Ladies Village Improvement Society was founded, and the very next month, its members convened the Greens Committee and turned their rapierlike attention to the pond. The ladies consulted an engineer from Kansas named Barnes, who advised the tamping-down of a six-inch layer of mud at the bottom, to create a solid lining and stop the “leaking.” The ladies “defined its edges” and lovingly tended the water irises and weeping willows, but brushed aside any thought of extensive plantings or enclosure behind hedges: It would be “an act of vandalism,” one of them wrote, “robbing the place of its individuality,” if they were “to make a modern park out of what had so long been a green open space.”
The “green scum” and “fungus” persisted, year in and year out, century in and century out. In 1903 and again in 1917, green scum covered the surface and residents wrote to the paper, fretting about water flow, oxygenation, and stagnation. In 1908, the L.V.I.S. hired a civil engineer named N.N. Tiffany to address the water-level and water-flow problem. The solution was the installation of a pump. Large volumes would henceforth be pumped in — 10,000 gallons a day in the 1920s.
Despite the green scum, up until 2021, Town Pond remained a healthy ecosystem, home to bullfrogs, fish, Canada geese, and a variety of waterfowl. Ospreys fed from the pond. In 1914, the actor John Drew donated two trumpeter swans, Lohengrin and Elas, to live there. (When Lohengrin died three years later, the L.V.I.S. bought a new pair.) Snapping turtles, locally called “torups,” have inhabited the pond on and off; they ate some swans in 1950. The resident ducks — then as now — have always been a mix of white-feathered domestic ducks and wild ducks. Goldfish or carp were observed in the pond from 1903 up until the 2021 dredging. There were so many that a “No Fishing” sign went up during the Depression. A hired consultant in the 1940s advised that the goldfish be regularly restocked, as they are a most wonderful, natural anti-mosquito agent.
But the most “Wind in the Willows” pond denizen is surely the muskrat. The muskrats (who I imagine wearing a waistcoat, like Badger, and maybe a monocle) caused endless trouble at midcentury, burrowing into the banks, creating cave-ins, and undermining the roots of the willows on the banks. To halt the erosion, in 1963 the L.V.I.S. announced that a wooden bulkhead would be constructed by A.B. Puglsey on the east side of the pond at a cost of $3,600. The bulkhead was extended around the circumference in 1964. Traditionalists at The Star, who liked the muskrats, editorialized against the bulkheads, saying that the pond was far more beautiful before and now looked “too artificial.”
In 1967, the Summer of Love, the muskrats returned. The newspaper editor cheered. Making sure the pond abided “the same as before” has been a primary concern of its caretakers since the 1880s. And ever it should be. When the willow trees were killed by “a willow disease” in 1928, Mrs. Lorenzo Woodhouse donated two Babylonian willows to replace them. When the purple water irises — a wonderful, natural, water-filtering flower, hint, hint — were plowed down and uprooted by one of the automobiles that crash into the pond every few years, new irises were planted to replace them.
Over the decades — over the centuries, at this point — there has been a general, mutual understanding that the pond should not be gussied up with unnecessary plantings, but vigilantly guarded so it can retain its open aspect. It is a low water body in the midst of a grassy plain. An open vista, a green common. This is why donations of flowers, bulbs, or shrubs were rarely accepted by the L.V.I.S. back in the day. “It must be in keeping with the character of East Hampton,” the chair of the Greens Committee in 1977 said of any new planting. “The Village is not only beautiful, it is open, visible, shared.”
The words “pea soup” have been associated with Town Pond since the 19th century. When the public (as it always did) started to complain about the water looking like “a green soup” (as it always did), the L.V.I.S. replied that the green color was “natural” and not a threat to the ecosystem. In 1989, Larry Penny, the town’s natural resources director at the time, identified the aquatic vegetation as duckweed or leafy pondweed. He said it was harmless, too.
I read that the invasive Eurasian watermilfoil that took root in the pond in 2022, following the dredging, is not harmless but chokes out the light and the oxygen, and also creates an ideal habitat for mosquitos. I’d like to learn more about the whys and wherefores of duckweed and pondweed, versus watermilfoil.
Having spent a few days reading the primary-source record of Town Pond, and therefore appointing myself (perhaps annoyingly) as a pond expert (for which I formally apologize here), I do feel I can legitimately point the finger at the bulkheads as a problem, and not just an aesthetic one. Plastic tongue-and-groove bulkheads, like those installed some 20 years ago, don’t swell, as wood does, and don’t hold water as well. Wood bulkheads sometimes require chemically treated or creosote-covered pilings to shore them up. Neither seems ideal. The water table is in play.
Sometimes the wisdom of earlier generations is, you know, wisdom after all. Maybe we need to revisit the recommendation of Barnes, the engineer from Kansas, who had the L.V.I.S. tamp down a “lens” of clay on the pond’s bottom to make it more watertight. And the idea of keeping the pond looking “as it was,” as an expanse of green modestly adorned with little more than willows, some native reeds, and water-filtering irises? Sounds about right to me.