Trashpaddler: Dudley Pond's Missing Link

Dudley Pond in Wayland, MA has long been on my radar but I just never managed to paddle it...until this past Sunday morning. I'd recently read in the 1868 History of the Introduction of Pure Water Into the City of Boston by Nathaniel Bradlee about Lake Cochituate being used to supply drinking water to the City of Boston (previous post). According to Bradlee there was an 800-hundred foot long pipeline connection between the neighboring 80-acre Dudley Pond and Lake Cochituate beginning in 1861. With Dudley Pond being at a higher elevation the water would flow by gravity to Lake Cochituate. My goal was to see if anything remained of the one-time pipeline connection.

This map from Bradlee's book shows Dudley Pond and its connection (upper red arrow) to Lake Cochituate...

Two red arrows to the right show where I'd launched into Dudley Pond and, later that same day, into the east side of Lake Cochituate. The arrow furthest to the left points to Lake Cochituate's outlet.

Bradlee described the connection between the pond and lake as "iron pipe eighteen inches in diameter and almost eight hundred feet long, which passes under the road leading from Wayland to Newton: in making this connection, it was necessary to cut through an embankment sixty feet high, as the nature of the soil prevented it being tunneled."

The location depicted on the map shows the beginning of the pipeline having been somewhere in the vicinity of Dudley Pond's Mansion Beach...

There was a good-sized pipe a little to the north but it was concrete rather than iron, smaller than 18" in diameter, and seemed too close to the water's surface...

...perhaps it's a storm drain outlet.

According to the book Wayland A - Z: A Dictionary of Then and Now by Evelyn Wolfson and Dick Hoyt "In 1926 the concrete pipe connecting the pond to the lake was discontinued because the pond had become more polluted than the lake and was no longer a desirable source of drinking water. The pipe was finally sealed in 1935."

Is there an unseen groundwater connection between Dudley Pond and Lake Cochituate? A 2012 USGS study, Simulation of Groundwater and Surface-Water Interaction and Effects of Pumping in a Complex Glacial-Sediment Aquifer, East Central Massachusetts by J.R. Eggleston, Carl S. Carlson, Gilliam M. Fairchild, and Phillip J. Zarriello addressed whether or not there was a groundwater connection between the higher elevation Dudley Pond (153 ft) and the lower elevation Lake Cochituate (138.5 ft): "Permeable sand and gravel deposits between the two sets of ponds should result in groundwater flow causing the level of Dudley Pond to drop closer to the level of Lake Cochituate. The reason these ponds can maintain such a high hydraulic gradient may lie at the bottom of the ponds. Sediment cores collected as part of a eutrophication study of Dudley Pond by the Town of Wayland (IEP, Inc,. 1983) indicated a layer of bottom muck sediments up to 14 ft thick. This muck layer referred to as gyttja, is partially decayed organic material that settles out of the water column through time and has black gel-like consistency. These deposits are an impediment to seepage losses from the pond to the aquifer and a likely explanation for why Dudley Pond exists and why the surface level does not substantially drop during the late summer when inflows to the pond are typically small." My first time ever hearing the word "gyttja".

Finished my paddle around the pond's perimeter passing some interesting artwork along the way...

Also saw the pond's natural outlet in the northeast corner...

...where exiting water flows eventually to the Sudbury River Watershed. Like Lake Cochituate Dudley Pond's waters are very clear.

Got back to where I'd launched from with the Dudley/Cochituate pipeline still on my mind so I loaded my boat and headed over to Cochituate's north pond to see if I could find any sign of the pipe's outlet. Launched from the Wayland Town Beach...

...and paddled along the lake's eastern shore to where the map shows the pipe entering Lake Cochituate. The only pipe/outlet structure in that area where water is piped to Lake Cochituate was this...

...which, perhaps, is a storm-drain outlet. It did, however, look very similar to the pipe seen at Dudley Pond.

Since finding myself back in Lake Cochituate I decided to take another stab at exploring the lake's outlet structure into Cochituate Brook. When I was there the previous Tuesday the northeast wind was too busy for my liking. Sunday's wind being out of the northwest was much better. Headed down pond towards the outlet on the west shore...

Found conditions at the outlet to be relatively calm...

...and soon found a place to land my boat. Then explored the two dams on foot. The upper dam...

...and the lower dam...

Before leaving the area I walked to the elevated area to the brook's south side where Josiah Temple, in his History of Framingham, said an Indian village was located. A fish weir was said to have been located downstream of the present dams. Here's the view looking south and up from the brook from below the dams...