Casperkill Watershed Oral History Project

Daffodils on Sunset Hill, sometimes referred to as “Daffodil Hill”

This weekend is reunion weekend at Vassar College so the Oral History Team has been using this opportunity to talk to alumnae and alumni about the Casperkill Watershed.  Not surprisingly, Vassar graduates are most familiar with the sections of the Casperkill and Fonteynkill that flow through the Vassar campus.  Many have fond memories of Vassar Lake and Sunset Lake, which are formed by dams along the Fonteynkill and Casperkill respectively.

When I asked Vassar alumna Sarah Carr (c/o 1970) if she had any memories of Sunset Lake she immediately began to tell me about “the worst case of poison ivy [she] ever had.”  Ms. Carr described how her Horticulture class had been in charge of planting the daffodils on Sunset Hill in the fall of 1969.  Under the supervision of Sven Sward, the head of the Vassar Grounds and Maintenance Department at that time, the class dug up the beds for the flowers in October.  “I know what poison ivy looks like” she told me, “but none of us realized that we were digging up the roots…many in the class were itching for weeks.” Ms. Carr informed me that much of the Vassar Campus was covered in poison ivy while she was there.  Students rarely ventured beyond the marked paths or mowed areas for fear of getting a bad rash.

Despite the poison ivy incident, Ms. Carr spoke fondly of Sunset Lake.  She described the area around the lake as being much more “natural” and “wild” in the late 1960s, with very few paved paths and no benches.  As for the lake itself, though, she told me that most everyone thought of it as an artificial “pond.”

There were no geese or other birds like the ones you might see there today.  The only things I remember seeing in the lake were goldfish.  Everyone used to dump their goldfish in the lake before they went home for the summer…there were some pretty big goldfish in there!

For more information about Sunset Lake, visit the Vassar Encyclopedia entry about the Lake at: http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/buildings-grounds/grounds/sunset-lake.html.

This entry mentions the October 1969 Sunset Lake protests, which many alumnae/i were eager to talk about with the Oral History team at Reunion.  The college had planned to build a house for the new vice president of student affairs on Sunset Hill when, on October 21, nearly 100 students and five faculty members participated in a spontaneous ‘fill-in’ at the construction site. The protesters filled in the site with sticks, shovels, buckets and hands, and the administration eventually decided to move the house to another location.