To Billerica dam, surveying the bridges.
Another foggy [sic], amounting from time to time to a fine rain, and more, even to a shower, though the grass was thickly covered with cobwebs in the morning. Yet it was a condensed fog, I should say. Its value appeared to be as a veil to protect the tender vegetation after the long rainy and cloudy weather.
The 22d, 23d, and 24th, I have been surveying the bridges and river from Heard’s Bridge to the Billerica dam. I hear of two places in Wayland where there was formerly what was called a hay bridge, but no causeway, at some narrow and shallow place, a hundred years ago or more. Have looked after all the swift and shallow places also.
The testimony of the farmers, etc., is that the river thirty to fifty years ago was much lower in the summer than now. Deacon Richard Heard spoke of playing when a boy on the river side of the bushes where the pads are, and of wading with great ease at Heard’s Bridge, and I hear that one Rice (of Wayland or Sudbury), an old man, remembers galloping his horse through the meadows to the edge of the river. The meadow just above the causeway on the Wayland side was spoken of as particularly valuable. Colonel David Heard, who accompanied me and is best acquainted of any with the details of the controversy, - has worked at clearing out the river (I think about 1820), - said that he did not know of a rock in the river from the falls near the Framingham line to perhaps the rear of Hubbard’s in Concord.
