Save Notch Forest
Watershed History
Most of the roughly 1,600 acres in our North Adams watershed were acquired by the city over the course of roughly 40 years. Archeological sites, newspaper clippings, and city records, and the land itself, hold pieces of the story.
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The more we know about a place, the more we care...
Newspaper Clippings
1896: Notch Reservoir Construction Over Budget
Naturally the people of this town have awaited with curiosity the official explanation of how a supposedly $40,000 piece of work has jumped to a cost approximating $100,000, -- a figure which will undoubtedly be exceeded before the work is at last completed.
1913: Council Committee Recommends Constructing Additional Reservoir
Three million gallons of water a day has been established as the actual daily average consumption of North Adams... Your main trouble, therefore, is a lack of storage capacity, and this would lead to disaster if a fire should occur while your reservoirs are empty.
I have carefully studied the various possible methods of improving this situation. These are the following:
1. Raising the present dam at the Notch, adding a storage capacity of about 24,000,000 gallons...
5. Constructing a reservoir on the Beaman farm to which the Notch reservoir would be made tributary, adn which would add about 1.5 square miles of watershed, and afford a storage of about 180,000,000 gallons, this reservoir to be connected with tthe pipe line from Broad Brook.
Discovery that the watersheds of the Mount Williams and Notch reservoirs are again being over-run almost daily by berry pickers, city officials today declared that they have decided to post a watchman on the property and that arrests and court appearances are in store for any more persons whom the watchman finds on the land.
Ever since it was discovered several years ago by some local berry pickers that blueberries and raspberries grew in abundance on the watersheds, city officials have had to cope each season with the problem of keeping trespassers off the land in order to prevent contamination of the water supply...
1933: WPA jobs start on Beaman and Broad Brook Watersheds
One hundred local men were mustered out of the army of the unemployed this morning when the city put their names on payrolls as employees on the first project to be opened here under the civil works plan.
The 100 men went to work on the local watersheds under a $19,670 grant from the federal civil works fund allotted by the state emergency finance board to the city to give them employment for 10 weeks....
At 8 o'clock one gang of 20 men began working on the watershed above the Beaman basin where a fire stop is to be cut throughthe town forest reservation and four other gangs of equal size began work on the Broad Brook watershed just west of teh Williamstown-Polwnal, Vt., boundary...
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