Nuclear Lake NY

   “Believe it or not, there's a lake off Route 55 near Pawling in eastern Dutchess County with the rather unusual name of Nuclear Lake. How on earth did it get that name?  It's certainly not something the local Chamber of Commerce would choose.  Well, it apparently was named when a former hunting preserve around the lake was purchased in 1955 by an outfit called Nuclear Development Associates.

The following, from Hike the Hudson Valley, has an amusing take on it all: ‘I know what you’re thinking.  Why would I ever want to visit a place called Nuclear Lake?  Well, let me set your mind at ease.  The only reason it’s even called Nuclear Lake (you’re going to think this is so funny when you hear it), is that in 1972, a chemical explosion blew out two windows in the experimental nuclear research lab that used to sit on the shore of the lake, blasting an unspecified amount of bomb-grade plutonium across the lake and surrounding woods. 

      See?  I bet you thought it was something bad.’

     “Now for some more strangeness.  At the north end of the lake, there are a bunch of stone walls in the woods.  Not normal stone walls like I'm familiar with - the straight walls that once lined farmer's fields but now lie in the woods as some hardscrabble farms were abandoned a century ago.  No, these stone walls ran up and down hills in curved paths.  Not marking farmer's fields either since no one could farm anything on the steep, stony hillsides around this part of the lake.”

A curvy stone wall running to the lakeshore. 

Another zig-zagging wall

   Who the hell builds a rock wall that zig-zags up the hill?  It's certainly not marking anyone's property line.  Another ran parallel the shoreline.  Why do that?

Is there a point to this?

Wall went around this mound

    One area had a wall encircling an artificial hill of stone.  It looked like a ritual space to me.

Another wall enclosed a rectangular area but was too sloppy to be a building foundation.

Not a foundation - Again, what's the point?

     Very strange.  Who built all of these stone walls (there were a lot of them!) that are running willy-nilly all over the place and why?"

From:Hudson Valley Geologist
See also:Turtle Rock in Warwick

Return to the Mortar/Turtle (Part One)

This "Return" will take a few posts...
Up in the northwest corner of CT, fairly recently, a road was bulldozed into former farmland to create something called Technology Park. Remnants of stone fences from the farm are still visible here and there, but I have this idea that many of these fences were built over existing stone rows that had been there hundreds (thousands?) of years, firebreak devices of the Native Americans who once lived there, part of their ecosystem management scheme.
And I also came across another textbook from another family member – my daughter this time. Apparently (note the word parent contained in that word) my wife and I financed the purchase of “The American Indian; Prehistory into the Present” by Arrell Morgan Gibson – for $60.75 plus tax. My daughter was born in 1981; the book was published the year before. The book’s point of view could be sort of summed up as how the American Indian reacted to the waves of Empires that took over the Indians’ Homeland, sometimes called Turtle Island.

So I’ll return to that little section of land I started talking about and showed a photo of a quartzite mortar stone (Teaser Pix ), a little bit of that “vast estate” along the Greater Housatonic River System, where rows of stones were used in order control a burn in a relatively densely populated area, protected from the bulldozer in modern times still because it is inside the boundary of an inland wetland inside an industrial park.

I followed the wrong stone row trying to return to the place and drew a picture of that row that I posted at Rock Piles (Soon Come ). I’ll amend that here with a drawing of the “next row to the north” of that row. You’ll be looking west from inside the wetland area, and so the top drawing is south, the bottom to the west and if you'd like you could imagine them joined together to get a general feel for how this section would appear, sort of a stylistic representation, trees and brush and poison ivy left out for clarity…

I found the fields I entered following the the bulldozer path using MapQuest, pretty much the same view I got from Google Earth, north at the top. The fields in the upper right are part of the Dairy Farm…

A detail with landmarks added…