To the Editor:
Unfortunately, what your reporter described and photographed as the “lost” Poughkeepsie spring (“The Source,” Jan. 25) is a St. Simeon apartment complex drain pipe, and I would certainly not recommend (for its “curative powers”) drinking anything flowing from it.
To set the record straight, the spring is located in the heart of a historic district which includes Locust Grove, Maple Grove, Springside and Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. Until 1950, the spring was part of a now-forgotten 52-acre estate variously known as Mulberry Farm, Hillside and Linden Place.
In the 19th century, an oval-shaped stone wall was built around the spring to form a small pond. The remains of this pond enclosure have guided modern investigators to the general location of the spring, which even in the 1920s was obscured by mud and pond silt and detectable only by the sound of trickling water.
The Linden Place estate was subdivided into housing lots, and its 21-room mansion was demolished. On the remaining six roadfront acres containing the spring, development projects were repeatedly proposed but failed to materialize until 2003, when the Richman Group Capital Corporation, one of the 20 largest residential property owners in the nation, built an 88-unit apartment complex on the spring parcel.
Town officials acquiesced to a toothless, bare minimum of protection for the spring, which now sits isolated and abandoned behind a six-foot stockade fence. The potential to understand and enjoy this unique local landmark has yet to be realized.
The background information used in your article should be properly credited to the remarkable historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, whose meticulous analysis of the word “Poughkeepsie” has remained unchallenged since 1924.
Holly Wahlberg
Poughkeepsie