It was a crisp, beautiful day at the pond. The air was cool, about 46 or 47 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was just a twinge of a wintry bite in the breeze. Four mallards cruised the pond, but no other animal life was apparent. The Clark and the grounds were relatively quiet and this afternoon was one of the more peaceful ones I’ve spent at the pond thus far.
My goal today was to track the changes since last I’ve been here. I haven’t seen the site for over a week, the longest I’ve gone without contact the whole semester. I also looked at the flora to get a sense of the natural succession at Wall’s Pond. Where the site has been (it’s past land use and the plant life that used to exist here) and where it’s headed in terms of what will grow and thrive on this land.
Brown has fully pervaded the pond and its environs. No leaves remained on any trees and the bordering vegetation swished and wallowed deadly in the slight breeze this afternoon. I noticed that a twenty-foot section of cow fence had collapsed at some point since my last visit, just to the left of the main entrance area. The knocked-over fence and the brush that went down with it compounded the sense of deadness that the rest of the barren vegetation delivered from every angle.
I turned my focus after some time, to the signs of tree succession as they refer to past land use, in order to get a better handle on the site’s history. The red maple at the north end of the pond and the white pine along the south edge are the tallest specimens on the site, perhaps denoting their advanced age relative to the other trees on the site. If this is true, and the beech, hemlock, and sugar maple in the vicinity are in fact younger than the red maple and white pine, then, according to the successional trends elsewhere in Williamstown, it indicates that Wall’s Pond is situated on former pastureland. This fits with my hypothesis from last week and begs the question: what can be predicted about the future of the site’s flora?
Red maple live to a maximum of 160 years and white pine usually not more than 200 years.  If the two types of tree began growing at the pond at around the same time, it would follow that the white pine might outlive the red maple by a few years. However, the aerial photograph of Wall’s Pond from 1935 shows the red maple (or a similarly sized tree on nearly the same spot) and not the line of white pine. Perhaps all the trees on the site were hand-planted, which would blow any successional predictions totally out of the water, but, assuming they’re not, this former pastureland has more beech, hemlock, black birch, yellow birch, and sugar maple to look forward to in the generations to come.
To get some real confirmation and to put my hypothesis to the test, I tracked down the head groundskeeper at the Clark, Pete Richard, in his office behind the conservation building. He and his soon-to-be successor, Matt Noyes, spoke for some time about their experiences growing up in Williamstown, skating on Wall’s Pond (in Pete’s youth it was known as Leak’s Pond), and watching as the Clark grew up beside the pond. Pete admitted he did not know the exact origin of the pond, but guessed that a spring on the site had been widened at some point in the 19th century to water livestock – just as I had surmised. He mentioned that the Leaks and the Walls had raised cows and horses, respectively, on the L-shaped property in his lifetime and that the gentle rolling topography of the site was most likely an effect of the pond’s excavation and the subsequent deposition of material on the north end. Neither Pete nor Matt could attribute the white pine grove to any particular human hand, so the jury is out on their origins. Pete did say, however, that the red maple at the north end of the pond is most likely the offspring of an earlier red maple that stood closer to the water on that side of the pond. After 20 miutes or so I told him I’d keep in touch, we parted ways, and I returned to campus.