Urban Pond Profile: Pine Island Pond

By Karen Marzloff
HippoPress.com

A dam is a small thing, but it has the power to change everything.
Lay a dam across a long, winding brook, right where the water makes its last rushing dash toward the Merrimack, and you end up with a better place to fish, a deeper swimming hole, maybe even the birthplace of a new city.

Pine Island Pond is nothing but a mile-long pause in Cohas Brook's journey from Chester to the Merrimack, but the wooded waterscape tucked between the Manchester Airport, Brown Avenue and the Anthem facility on Goffe's Falls Road has captured the city's imagination for longer than it's been a city.

Almost a century before Samuel Blodget laid out plans for a canal that would bypass Amoskeag Falls and change Manchester's fortunes forever, John Goffe got dibs as Manchester's first settler when he built his sawmill here at the mouth of Cohas Brook.

And beginning exactly one hundred years ago, the pond earned fame for itself and for the city as home to Pine Island Park, an amusement park and picnic grounds almost too large to picture: of the 135 total acres, 36 were developed with boating, picnic areas, a dance pavilion, arcades, and rides that included the thrills of a roller coaster, a carousel, an Aeroplane Swing, and the Honeymoon Express Ferris Wheel. Today, Pine Island Park is a much-reduced 8.3 acres that feature a playground and a short nature trail, but the old park is showcased in an exhibit that opens Dec. 14 at the Manchester Historic Association's Millyard Museum.

The land along the shore has been home to a 4-H center; The Elms, a celebrated year-round resort; and a Moxie bottle-shaped house (which Manchester resident Merrill Lewis is determined to see restored from the original parts-now in storage-at the Moxie exhibit at the Matthews Museum of Maine Heritage in Union, Maine).

A few houses, Anthem and the city of Manchester now share the shoreline, and volunteers monitor the Pond's progress. Though the water quality has measurably declined over the past 20 years, volunteer observers in the summer and fall of 2000 found fishermen, swimmers jumping off the dam, great blue herons, a hawk, mallards and mergansers sharing the water.

Pine Island Pond is part of the city's Urban Ponds Restoration Program. To find out more about the pond or how to get involved with efforts to preserve it, contact coordinator Art Grindle at 624-6450.

The Pine Island Park exhibit will open at the Millyard Museum, the corner of Pleasant and Commercial streets, Dec. 14. Admission to the museum is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and college students with an ID, $2 for children 6 to 18 and free to kids under 6. The maximum family fee is $15.

Karen Marzloff can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com