Letters

We are writing to tell you all we learned about the work on Town Pond.

We are in second grade at John M. Marshall Elementary School, in Kristine Eberhart’s class. We learned that Town Pond was built in June 1653. It was a manmade pond used to water the cattle. Many animals began to build homes in, on and around the pond. Some of the animals were swans, fish, turtles and frogs. In the winter, kids love to go ice skating on our pond.

Sadly, we learned that people dumped their animals in the pond. These animals are called invasive animals. The invasive animals fought the native animals, ate their food and bit the swans.

On our walking field trip to Town Pond, Dell Cullum showed us a lot of trash from the pond. We saw an old clock, a glass milk bottle from the deli near our school, a glass 7-up bottle from long ago, a wagon wheel, an old iron that does not use electricity to heat up, and pieces to an old-fashioned Jeep.

A third thing we learned was there was a lot of sludge in the pond. This was not good for the pond for two reasons. The first was that there was a lot of sludge and not a lot of water. So the snapping turtles were close to the surface and snapped at the swans. The swans did not like that, so they found a new home. The second reason is that the sludge was hot and it didn’t let the pond freeze quickly when it was cold. 

We learned many good things about the pond being dredged. The first thing we learned was that the sludge was not toxic or polluted, so it would be used to grow plants. This is called reusing materials — this is good for our environment. They found new homes for the invasive animals, so the native animals can have their food and a healthy pond. A fun fact is that now that the pond has a little muck and a lot of water, it will freeze faster and we can go ice skating, yippee!

Now that the pond is clean, we would like to keep it healthy and clean. We did a video conference with the East Hampton Village Board. We told them some ideas we had to keep our Town Pond as a great place to visit the animals and have a picnic. One thing we hope to see is garbage cans for the trash. We also hope they put up a sign to tell people to not dump their animals, like turtles or fish.

Thank you for listening to us.

Kristine Eberhart and students

Second Grade

John M. Marshall Elementary School

East Hampton