A chain-link fence lines either side of dam. The enormous dam still stands in the path of new hiking trails, but the village was never built. The Martha-Mary Chapel still holds weddings. The Wayside Inn still operates as an inn. Once Ford died in 1947, his village idea was abandoned. But the brook just ran underneath the blocks.
After all the work it took to build it, the water would fill up in the spring and drain out in the summer.įrom 1930 to 1946, Campbell tried to save the project, building large concrete blocks to plug the holes in the earth where the water broke through. So, the water simply streams right underneath it. The ground beneath the dam is porous and cracked, and some parts of it is sand. “The reservoir area is underlain by what’s called incompetent fractured bedrock,” Kaplan said. It was a mammoth barrier between the trickling brook and the land that would become Ford’s village. When completed, the dam was structurally sound.
Oxen lugged stone from local hillsides and men used pullies and levers to heave the stone into place. The entire dam was built with nothing but manpower and oxen. A section of the dam and reservoir as it stands today at Ford’s Folly in Sudbury. So, he and his project manager John Campbell created a large stone dam that would act as a reservoir. In order for this colonial village to operate, he needed to stop Hop Brook from flowing onto the land. “He had this idea that being close to the land was like a patriotic lifestyle.” “He had a vision in mind that he was going to create this colonial village, in which people would live and work the way they did in the 18th and 19th centuries,” said Aline Kaplan, a Boston-based tour guide and blogger who lived in Sudbury for 37 years. Ford purchased almost 3,000 acres of land in 1923, which now includes the Wayside Inn, Martha-Mary Chapel, and the Grist Mill.
Built in the 1920s, the structure was the brainchild of Henry Ford - the founder of Ford Motor Company and creator of the assembly line.
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