The waterflows in Holliston on the west side of Highland St. are a little easier to understand than those of the east side of town.  It is helpful to remember that our town has a north/south backbone of five hills – our own little “Continental Divide.”  Some of these hills we know well, but several may be somewhat obscure to some of us.  Starting at the north, there is Broad Hill as Highland St. tops out before descending into Ashland.  There is Bald Hill a bit to the south.  Coming to the midsection we have our own special Mount Hollis.  What other town can claim a mountain right in the center of town?  Powder House Hill now sits back hidden between the High School playing fields and Goodwill Park.  Finally, Phipps Hill, undercut by the railroad tunnel just south of Washington St., completes our set of five hills.  The west slope of all these hills brings the water flow down into the Chicken Brook crease.

Chicken Brook starts up north of the Audubon Waseeka Wildlife Sanctuary.  As my first photo shows, the beavers do a good job of damming up the brook even before it gets down to the large Waseeka ponding area which Audubon created by building a long earthen dam as they developed this wildlife preserve fifty or sixty years ago.  Below this dam, Chicken Brook takes a long and fairly straight journey through the golf course, then under Washington St. just east of Underwood St.  After a small swampy woodland section, it flows under the Upper Charles Rail Trail, down through a Cross St. ponding area, under Cross St. and settles to dance in and out under the Rail Trail as is shown in my second photo by the Cutler Homestead Pond.  We then lose sight of Chicken Brook as it flows down through the Wenakeening Woods and Mission Springs hiking trails – and finally down to the Charles River in West Medway. 

At the far west side of town, the headwaters of the Hopping Brook seep out of Rocky Woods and the Holliston Town Forest.  (How do we deserve Hopping Brook on our western border, and Dopping Brook on our eastern border?  Enough to confuse a few of us from time to time!)  My photo shows Hopping Brook as it flows down under Adams St. It continues down to Weston Pond, then under Washington St. headed down to the Charles River in Medway where Bellingham and Franklin border one another on the south side of the Charles. 

Between these two west-of-Highland St. brooks, lies the perhaps lesser-known Beaver Dam Brook.  On some maps this brook remains nameless – a default to the Cedar Swamp and Burnt Swamp names between Prentice St. and Washington St.  Due to the ongoing activity of beavers in this area, I prefer to call it its very appropriate historic name.  This brook starts up in the slot between North Mill St. and Mill St. near the Hopkinton town line.  My photo shows it flowing under Prentice St. as it enters the two large swamps.  It flows under (well sometimes over!) Washington St. just beside the historic Littlefield Tavern and then spreads into a large wetland area, joining up with Hopping Brook to add to our good contribution to the Charles River as described above. 

Before concluding this description of our Holliston Waters, I want to note that Chicken Brook actually throws us a curve ball every Spring.  As it first crosses under the Rail Trail just west of the Phipps Tunnel, it puts out a little trickle of ground water that fills the side trenches of the trail and flows east through the tunnel drainage pipes and down into our East-of-Highland Street watershed.  Tunneling a hillside for a railroad can change the waterflows in unexpected ways.  At any rate, be they east or west, we have plentiful good brooks and streams flowing in all parts of our town.  In this we are all quite fortunate.  Hopefully we have the wisdom to care for them well in the coming decades.

Walter McClennen,  Mudville, April 2023