I have been wanting to restore an old pond here for about forever. Well, for 50 years at least. Part of the plan was to put the concrete from the foundations of all the old buildings we have been tearing down behind the dam so it was buried and gone!
This is from the old barn (see previous posts) and is the last of the foundations.
In 2000, I started digging out the fill from the old pond. In 2001, I put in a "temporary" dam that was there for 9 years. I worked on and off when it was not too muddy mostly digging a trench to put the stand pipe in for the level control in the pond. In this picture, you can see the pipe sticking up with a white bucket over it. The pipe is now buried in the dam. The work to remove the temporary dam is also under way. This was spring 2010.
In this picture you can see the tee in the pipe that the level control stand pipe comes up from. The perspective in this picture is weird in that the pipe is way down in a hole. The concrete anti-seep collar in the lower left is 2 ft by 2ft by 5 inches.
Here we are working to drain the pond behind the temporary dam in the middle of the picture. This picture was taken from on the new dam. The water, or ice, in the lower right side of the picture is where the excavator has already started work. The water is about 5 ft deep below the ice along the straight edge.
Here you can see Duane Olson of Olson Excavating pulling dirt out of the pond. He is very good with that thing. He has lots of hours and three of these and lots of other "big boy" toys.
I couldn't do this with my Bobcat because I kept getting stuck. I thought about getting tracks for my bobcat, but I would have still been real slow. Duane made this look easy. But you can see why the Bobcat kept getting stuck.
The deer found it right away as soon as we quit letting the water go out the drain pipe and the pond started to fill from the natural springs in the bottom and sides of the pond.
We were wondering how many years it would take before we saw the stand pipe level control work. Then in the last week (ten days?) we got about 7.5 inches of rain. It filled up real fast. !! So far the stand pipe level control is handling the flow, but the water is really blasting out the pipe behind the dam. It didn't take the ducks long to find the pond. These are two pairs of blue wing teal. Before that we had a great blue heron visit the pond. He worried us a bit because we only have seen a few frogs and turtles in the pond so far.
The silt pond is full too. There were mallard ducks on this pond.
And Moony's dam is full. All this water is headed for our new pond. A pair of geese were swimming around.
Mary's old rebuilt white stone wall looks great. We don't know why the original wall was built here. Maybe to protect the well that is behind it?...
I still have some dirt to move and smooth out and we have to get grass growing, but now it doesn't take too much imagination to tell what it may look like.
Historical foot note: While I was digging the trench for the drain pipe, I found a wooden structure about 5 ft down. I thought it must be an old bridge. It had a layer of metal sheeting on top of it. It seemed kind of strange, but we didn't think much more about it until Alma gave us the picture below.
These men appear to be a CCC crew. I have been able to pick out some land marks to fix this at the location that I dug out the old bridge.
Randy
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