Readers' Voices for July 14
One thing is crushingly clear.
Dam builders have not improved with time.
It appears that they are not nearly as efficient as in bygone years.
The second dam, the one that served us for about 90 years, was built a long time ago. (The one that served us so well until very recent times.) Then, someone failed to open the flood gates after a walloping rain storm and the earthen embankment was washed out.
So the state, in its vast and infinite wisdom, decided that the present dam would be exactly what was needed.
It's plain to see what happened.
The old swamp of over 200 years ago now holds forth. Once, we had three large, useful and scenic lakes gracing our midst. A smaller one was behind the Cumberland plant.
The Bluff Lake, where Sonic Drive-In is now located, left long ago when the mill failed due to recession. No. 2 Lake was lost after the textile plant vacated to a new building on Legion Road.
I first saw Hope Mills Lake in the 1930s. I worked in various places nearby and below the lake. After World War II, for many years I was a town government member. We operated the lake without mishap after 1959, often raising the gates during seasons of rain.
Part of that time, and before then, I worked for the Brower Plant at No. 2 Lake, about the same size as No. 1 Lake, but on a much bigger stream. Eddie Brower, Lee Gales, Jeff Johnson, several others and I kept it intact. It powered a large electric generator. We had to be alert in heavy rains to raise the storm control gates. Lake Upchurch, largest in the area, would warn us when they were opening the gates a mile or more upstream.
Alertness to the weather conditions was required to keep the lakes intact. The lakes were an absolute necessity for textile plant operation. They furnished the operating power in the early days, a little later water for the big steam driven engines, dyeing cloth and fighting the fires that often plagued cotton mills.
After city water became available, the lakes became a prized recreation and scenic resource, part of our history, a comforting part of our present.
A blessing.
Al Brafford, Hope Mills
Now, with only one left, we had better hang on.