Tales from Breckwood Pond and Putnam's Puddle

Here’s a weird but true story: on Saturday, June 18, 1966, a bunch of teenagers attacked two middle-aged guys fishing at Breckwood Pond. The assault involved clubs and bats, and one of the punks showed them a knife.

I went on to read some follow-up to this incident, and subsequent newspaper stories told the whole drama. The kids taunted the two men, who lived in Gateway Village, which is behind the pond. The fishermen ignored the razzing until the teens suddenly began swinging on them with their weapons. Edward J. Howard did a good job defending himself, but he saw his friend, Leroy R. Davey, with his arms up fending off the clubs while blood was running down his face.

Then Howard slugged a couple of the youths, took a club away, and cracked one of them in the head with it—hard enough to break it in two. Howard fell on the dazed kid and pinned him down. The others pleaded with him to let their companion up, but Howard said he wouldn’t until they started walking away. So they complied. “After that, everyone went on their way,” said Howard.

Neither adult sought medical attention, but Howard did eventually go down to the station to identify the 17-year-old from Cherokee Drive as the one he nailed with the stick.

A 15-year-old was also arrested. Police questioned other youths, “who were known to run together in the same gang.” At first glance, it appears that the gang was probably The Clan, which hung out at Treats in the Breckwood shops and was Sixteen Acres’ largest gang—well-established by ’66 with more than 100 of them by the late 1960s. The Clan had a lot of members from the Cherokee Drive area (behind Duggan) but the 15-year-old was from Barnard Street—a block from the end of Breckwood off Bay Street. This seems a little outside The Clan’s area, but then again, he probably went to Duggan with those guys.

I had always known that the state used to stock Breckwood Pond with trout—although I never caught anything in this pond.  

When I was around 12, for the hell of it, once on the way back home from another unsuccessful attempt at fishing at Breckwood, I dropped a line over the redstone bridge over the brook leading to Breckwood (above)—into the North Branch of the Mill River on Sunrise Terrace/North Branch Parkway. My bobber instantly disappeared. I gave the line a yank—something big was hooked. The pole bent. I reeled. Holy shit, this was no pumpkinseed. What the hell was on the other end?

I pulled and the line snapped. I stumbled backward, and almost into the road. Hook, bait, bobber, and sinker—all gone. My god, what monster was on the line? It was strong. A turtle? I told everyone it had to be a trout. And maybe it was.

Did someone really need to toss a TV into Breckwood Pond?

An unidentified container submerged in the foreground.

A couple of years ago I brought my eight-year-old daughter to fish at Breckwood Pond because I knew they stock it every spring with trout and bass. The pond was now tiny—overrun with plants because they never replaced the broken Putnam’s Puddle dam, which prevented the silt buildup downstream. I reasoned that a smaller pond would make it easier to catch fish.

The parking lot, I knew, had a reputation for drug dealing. There had been several busts over the years, But there were no cars there when we pulled in—it was just us two, and the junk people had tossed near the shore. What I hadn’t prepared for was all the undergrowth where the beach used to be. We had to bushwhack through it. And then the shore itself—an overturned hibachi, tires—what happened to this place? No, we didn’t catch anything. In fact, it looks too shallow to hold any fish!

Mud and underbrush have invaded the area where the North Branch of the Mill River empties into Breckwood Pond. 

As was the case of Putnam's Puddle, WPA workers manually carved out Breckwood Pond and dammed it. How about digging both ponds out again?

I had heard that they had also stocked Putnam’s Puddle a long time ago, but I never gotten confirmation—until I dug up a  couple of Springfield Daily News photos on microfilm. I knew from online research that there were a couple of photo captions about the pond from April of 1950, so my heart started racing, because the only photo of Putnam’s I know of is an incredibly grainy newspaper pic from 1956 of a couple of kids standing next to the dam on the Sunrise Terrace side:

Unfortunately, the “new” old photos uncovered were closeups of people, not the pond itself, but the info did shed some light on the great fishing to be had there: 20 inch trout!

On the first day of trout season the guy pictured caught a 15 1/2-inch trout. He came all the way from Oak Grove Avenue near AIC! Then again, not many people lived around Putnam’s Puddle in 1950–most of the first subdivisions on the Sunrise side wouldn’t be built for a few more years. The water was clean before all the resulting storm drains emptied into it and there was even a swimming beach at the end of Maebeth Street.

It would have been great if the pond had supported sustainable a trout population after they had stopped stocking it—so I could have caught the offspring of those bad boys in the 1970s!

For some reason, I can’t remember when I caught my first fish at Putnam’s Puddle. It was with a friend’s pole, before I got my own, so he let me have a few casts and I caught the occasional pumpkinseed or small-mouth bass. But I remember my first fish I caught with my own pole. When I finally bought a pole, probably at the Eastfield Mall Sears, it was  late in the day—no friend was around—so I ran down the hill at the end of Maebeth Street, cast a line, waited impatiently, reeled, and cast again. Over and over. No luck. I walked down the path to the cement storm drain culvert down the hill from Catalpa Street. This spot had usually yielded results because the water was deeper than the Maebeth shore. But not this day. Daylight was waning and mosquitoes were swarming. Damn! Then, finally, the bobber bobbled, went under, and voila! I had a pumpkinseed. No one was around to see it, but who cares? I had my own pole and caught a fish.

Of course I threw the fish back. Who in his right mind would keep a pumpkinseed? I caught two more before it got dark. Ah yes, when that bobber starts dancing, your heart starts pumping, your muscles tense up, and that rush of adrenaline when that fish is fighting you—nothing like it. I owe my modest fishing skills to Putnam’s Puddle, where I caught hundreds of fish.

For some reason my fishing was few and far between for a few decades, but then my daughter caught the fishing bug during the annual Spec Pond fishing derby, and got a trophy for catching a bass:

At the following year’s derby, when she was eight, she caught the biggest fish of the day, a 12 1/2-inch bass, bringing home the top trophy. She was hooked, so to speak.

To be sure, I wouldn’t be able to bait the hook, tie lines, and put together the tackle—or have taught my daughter how to fish— without Putnam’s Puddle. She still refuses to bait the hook—she says when she’s in college and goes fishing, she’s going to get on the phone and call me to come over and put on the worm.

In past posts I’ve lamented about the sad state of Putnam’s Puddle—now a stream ever since the dam gave way in 1982: 

In 1978, the City Council had pointed out that the dam needed repairs, but nothing was done, and then four years later the dam was breached. Meanwhile, sediment and debris that the dam used to siphon continued to wash downstream over the decades, silting over Breckwood Pond.

In a post from 2020 I mentioned a proposal to restore Breckwood Pond by removing the rest of the Putnam’s Puddle dam, improving the stream channel, and dredging Breckwood Pond. I guess the idea would be reinforcing the stream banks to prevent erosion:

If they’re considering spending money on dredging and dam removal, wouldn’t it make sense to simply dredge both the Puddle and Breckwood and repair the dam? That would save TWO ponds! And we can fish in BOTH again.

Readers, what do YOU think? Leave a comment!

More on Putnam's Puddle:

Part 1

Part 2

A proposal to tear down the dam (scroll down)