Restore dam and restore Pine Lake, biologist appointed to committee urges
Long before Hudson’s Pine Lake became a magnet of controversy, it was simply a place for the small amount of children in town to gather and grow up together, say those who lived around it decades ago.
Work on the lake itself — clearing the land, building a dam — started in 1946, after a group of 10 citizens were officially deemed the Pine Lake Club at a council meeting that spring.
Michael Dudgeon’s father was one of the men who helped clear the area. As a child and teenager, Dudgeon would help him lower or lift logs in and out of the lake to control water levels before the freeze and then again in the spring.
The lake was great for two things, the 73- year- old said over the phone from his home just west of Chicago.
In the summer time, he said, you could sit there and catch trout without much more than a worm and a hook. But it’s real advantage came in the winter, when a rinksized rectangle would be cleared off for shinny.
“You could go whenever you wanted,” Dudgeon said. “We’d play morning until night on weekends, or from after school right until dark on weekdays.”
Ownership of the lake was eventually transferred to the Town of Hudson in the mid-’ 80s. Five years later, a loan was used to build a new dam for roughly $ 60,000.
Last summer, the dam failed and the lake dried out. To fix it or not became a divisive issue in town. An initial loan bylaw of up to $ 750,000 to fix the dam was subject to a referendum back in November after enough residents signed a registry to force one. The referendum was eventually cancelled, the loan bylaw withdrawn, and long- term plans are yet to be established.
But long before any of that, 63- year- old Poppy Humphrey remembers paddling around off the beach at the bottom of Cedar Avenue while the older kids swam. Her family’s property bordered the lake.
She still owns a picture her father took, taken from Cameron Road and looking toward their then- future property. She assumes he was planning on sending it out to family; on the back of it he scribbled that there was going to be a lake built where the swamp was.
She remembers corn boils and BBQs for lake members, and falling asleep to the sound of bullfrogs on warm summer nights.
“I’d walk down to the lake with some old bread and feed the ducks,” she said from her home in Charlottetown, P. E. I. “You’d call for them and no matter where they were on the lake, they’d hear you and come swimming.”
Susan Jephcott, now 76, says it was her father who introduced the ducks to the lake after raising a few in her backyard.
She remembers playing around in the lake as kids, rolling up muck at throwing it at each other.
“You could even knock someone out of their boat, you know, with a big ball of green stuff,” she said.
Living just a little up the road on Cameron, on warm nights she and her sister would sneak out of their bedroom window and head down to the lake to skinny dip.
“It was really a beautiful, fun place to live,” she said. “An idyllic time.”
As childhoods gave way to teenage years, the lake became a great place to go down “and snuggle with boyfriends.”
When Jephcott drove out to Hudson last summer for a “memory tour”, she stopped and sat on the edge of the remaining stream, watching birds diving in. The lake was drying up, grass was growing over it and bushes were sprouting up, but she says it was still easy to remember what it once was.
Humphrey was in Hudson two and half years ago. It looked like the beach hadn’t been kept up, she said, but for the most part the lake looked the same, except that the pine trees bordering it had grown with each passing year.
“Now it’s rather heartbreaking to see it the way it is,” she said. “I think most of the people who grew up around it would love to see it restored.”
Dudgeon is still reminded of the lake most days.
His father was the record keeper for the club, and when he passed away 10 years ago, they emptied the old house on Cameron Road, finding all the records and donating them to the Hudson memorial library.
But he also took a painting from the home, one he brought back to his house in Chicago. His mother had it painted decades ago: a view of the lake, as the family saw from its front lawn.