Monday, August 1, 2022

Starting to Scrape Bottom

 

Not a lot of water greeted me at the Lincoln Canoe Launch last Thursday late-morning as our summer drought conditions persist.

An irrigation pump nearby was busy sucking water from the river and dispersing it through a sprinkler on an adjacent field...


The stone boathouse in Fairhaven Bay sat high and dry...


This eagle was encountered at several spots around the bay...


On Saturday I paddled the upper Concord River starting from an also high and dry Egg Rock...


Concord's Mill Brook tributary was non navigable...


Another item recently exposed was the outlet for the Concord Wastewater Treatment Facility...


A couple of old bottles were also exposed.  The first was a half-pint Ginter Co. Importers Boston MA bottle dating to perhaps either side of 1900...

On Jack Sullivan's blog Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men is an interesting post about the Ginter Company's owner.

A little further along and on the same side of the river was this Hood's Sarsaparilla bottle...

Unfortunately it has an internal crack but is still watertight.  The sarsaparilla was bottled at  C. I. Hood and Company in Lowell, MA where according to Historic New England a large brick laboratory was built in 1882.  It was said to be 4 stories high with 175,000 square feet.  There were 18 tanks used in making enough sarsaparilla to fill 420,000 bottles of Hood's Sarsaparilla or enough to load 54 freight cars.  The building which is still there today and now known as Thorndike Exchange is located about 3/4 of a mile from the confluence of the Concord and Merrimack rivers.  The bottle appears to date from 1890.  

Also exposed by the declining water level was yet another trash bag of mail similar to the many found previously in this same area...


Turned around at October Farm...


...where I visited the ruins of William Brewster's cabin...

...and his nearby house fit for a canoe...

While out on the Concord I encountered a pair of paddlers in folding Oru kayaks.  This is the 16 ft long model...
These boats can be carried to and from the water in a bag.


Trash from Thursday...

Trash from Saturday where glass outnumbered plastic for a change...



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Several times a year I take my small motorboat form Lowell Rd, to Billerica. I've picked up several bags of saturated mail. Recently I brought some to the Post Office in Concord. They said that the culprit has been fired, he was also dumping mail in the woods in Carlisle. At least the flow of mail has been stopped. I'll continue to grab the bags that I can get to. As you may know, they weigh a ton!
Trevor

Al said...

They sure are saturated! Many of the bags I've come across contained the white mail crates. Considering the bags you and I have found plus the ones dumped in the woods I'm left to wonder if this person ever delivered any mail at all. Al