Moving Water: A Brook Flows Through Time
When: 11:30 am Saturday, April 10, 2010
Where: HCC Performing Arts Building
Who: Directed by Charles Lyman
Tickets: Free
A film about a family and the changing ecology of the Theodore Lyman Preserve at Red Brook in Wareham, Massachusetts.
From the Filmmaker
"Moving Waters: A Brook Runs Through Time" is the intimate history of Red Brook, which springs from lakes a little north of Wareham and the Cape Cod Canal, and flows through a beautiful, unspoiled, tidal estuary to Buttermilk Bay and then to Buzzard's Bay, and finally to the Atlantic ocean.
"When my ancestors, the Pilgrims, landed at what is now Plimouth Plantation, near the headwaters of Red Brook, the native indians had used the brook for many centuries as a boundary marker between tribes, and as a rich and inexhaustible source of seafood.
"Its bounty continued through ownership by colonial farmers to their urban descendants, and by the 1830s, it was fished by a few unusually sensitive and scientifically aware members of America's rapidly growing urban intelligentsia – both from Boston, only three quarters of an hour by train from Wareham, and from urban centers as remote as New York.
"Eminent minds such as Professor Louis Agassiz, the founder of the study of Biology Natural History at Harvard and the creator of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Senator Daniel Webster and writer and naturalist Theodore Lyman, fished and studied together at Red Brook.
"By 1863, when Lyman left for the Civil War to serve under George Gordon Meade (the victor at the battle of Gettysburg), Red Brook along with most free running streams in Massachusetts, were in trouble. The industrial revolution wanted their power and their water. Red Brook was dammed and diverted to service the cranberry bogs which produced the main cash crop for the area.
"When he returned victorious from the war, Lyman became one of the first Commissioners of Fisheries in the State of Massachusetts.
"Col. Lyman the third was the heir to a substantial fortune amassed by his skillful grandfather in the China trade. Theodore Lyman the first had swift clipper ships which left regularly from Kennibunk, Maine and the Port of Boston, for the Orient.
"Lyman's father was Mayor of Boston, but died young, and left great estates in Waltham and Brookline to his son, who was also empowered with a strong social position, and one of the first degrees in natural science (as opposed to religion or philosophy or the classics) from Harvard University.
"In 1876 Theodore III was successful in "buying" five of the six miles of Red Brook's moving water, from its source to its mouth, from the farmers and cranberry growers who owned lots along its verge. Theodore bought Red Brook not just to fish it for pleasure, but to control and protect its endangered ecology, and to experiment with increasing and varying its fisheries.
"For the next 135 years the brook passed from father to son and daughter in an unbroken succession of physicists and doctors, naturalists, fisheries experts and experimental biologists. One was the founder of the popular magazine "The Salt Water Sportsman", and three were Professors of Science at Harvard University.
"In 1996, in the fourth generation of Lymans descending from Theodore III, the family gave Red Brook to the people of Massachusetts. Now it is called the "Theodore Lyman Red Brook Preserve".
"Under the care of the state, private non-profits and the MakePeace Cranberry corporation, Red Brook has been restored to a condition very close to its natural state before its shores were settled by Europeans.
" Even the iridescent brook trout seem to approve, for they have increase in size and numbers."
– Charles Lyman
About Red Brook
"Named for water tinted red by the iron-rich soil near its source, Red Brook has been used by humans for nearly two millennia". Read more about Red Brook and the Lyman Preserve at the Trustees of Reservations website.
See Red Brook
Using Google Maps' Street View, you can actually catch a glimpse of Red Brook as it passes under Red Brook Road along the Lyman Preserve near Plymouth, Ma. View it here.
Dam Removal
Cranberry growers dammed the Red Brook to produce growing bogs. Those dams are being removed through a cooperative effort between one of the growers, Trout Unlimited and the state of Massachusetts. This website has before and after pictures of the removal of the first of four dams.
The "Salters"
"First protected by naturalist Theodore Lyman in the late 1800s, the quality and temperature of Red Brooks' cold waters and the absence of manufacturing dams made it home to a population of native sea-run brook trout – "salters" – that Lyman, an ardent angler, could not resist.
"Today, Red Brook is one of the few remaining fisheries in the state where you can find Lyman's beloved salters,
thanks to continuing stewardship by his descendants."
From "Protecting the Theodore Lyman Reserve"
