WHEELER HOLLOW OR THE WATER WORKS
(NOW THE VERGENNES WATER SHED AREA)

Going after our milking cows one early morning in mid-summer of 1941, looking down on the valley, it was all under water. Dad and I were wondering where it came from. When we got back to the barn, Mark Peck, our neighbor, below us had walked up to tell us that the Water Works' dam had broken in the night, taking out the bridge on North Street with it.

Most all the trees and clumps of bushes were rolled right up with their roots in the air from North Street back up to the dam. What a sight that was!

The dam was sitting on a ledge on the east side. It leaked there after they got it done; after the dirt got saturated, it let go.

That morning many people from Vergennes including the Week School's boys came to help sand bag a new dam. In the late afternoon, a 1939 dump truck and a 1936 Essex come head on on our hill in back of the barn. Totaled both vehicles. Nobody got hurt. There was a little booze involved. My father took his 1935 "A" John Deere with steel wheels and tried to pull them apart, but couldn't.

There were no deer and very little wildlife before the dams were built, because it was open too much with not much cover. After the Water Shed was closed to cattle and the cutting of wood, then cover came. They planted a lot of open land to red and white pines. Some places they grew, some they didn't. The first deer I saw shot was killed as it crossed the meadow between the two dams where the pine plantation is now. The pines were two feet tall. The buck came from the east side going to the west next to the big dam's north fence. This was 1940. Bill Scott Sr., a young man and Eldon Griffith, who was the city clerk at that time both shot from the turnaround and killed it. Bill gave it to Eldon. My father and I came by a minute too late. It was a five pointer. This was the first deer to come out of the Water Works. On snow you might find one set of tracks in the Water Shed area.

Then November, 1950, a terrible hurricane came through this area falling all the trees on the top of the Hollow, making excellent deer cover. This is when the deer really came on. A man couldn't walk through it because the trees were so deep. Trees were all tipped to the northwest. They called this storm a southeaster hitting the New Haven to Vergennes area very bad.

We and our deer hunting pals hunted on the high hill on the west side of the Hollow in the 50's taking out a few deer. Then the deer spread out into the valleys and surrounding farms, so we started hunting the low lands.

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