To Gather & To Heap Up: The Mystery of Tanners Pond: an investigation

I was in second grade in 1978, in Garden City, New York, and Mrs. Tiernan taught us local history. Down a very small slope from our school, was a street named Tanners Pond Road:

It runs from the northern border of GC, down to village’s waist. From there, it picks up the name Edgemere Road:

Edgemere ends at the southern border of the village. Mrs. Tiernan told us there was a pond in or at Tanners Pond Road. She taught us that tanneries are smelly and need lots of water to operate. This is true, but was there really a pond at Tanners Pond Road? Is this true?

I think I have marshalled enough evidence to prove that there was a watercourse from the north of Tanners Pond Road to the south of Edgemere Road. Here is the evidence:

The elevation above sea level of my old house is 96ft:

Tanners Pond Road is at the bottom of a slight valley at 77ft:

Several blocks passed the road the tiny valley reaches 96ft again:

So Tanners Pond Road sits in a valley that is nearly 20ft deep. Interestingly, the elevation at the north end of Tanners Pond Road is 86ft:

And at the southern end the elevation is 69ft:

I have measured at the base of a small pond at the Garden City Country Club Gold Course for reasons I will explain below. So, both Tanners Pond and Edgemere Road run through a north-south a slope that loses 17 feet in elevation.

So these roads sit in a valley of about 20 feet, and slope gently but firmly from north to south. This is in keeping with the geography of Long Island. The North Shore of Nassau County’s highest point is Harbor Hill at 350 feet. The South Shore tappers off to sea level. You can see one particularly “steep” slope of the valley here, at the northern end of Tanners Pond Road:

The elevation is 94ft just beyond the top of the hill, where the slope levels off, and on Tanners Pond Road, it is 83ft, so Tanners Valley here is 11ft deep. The slope of this valley is considerable gentler elsewhere, and is not highly visible on Google Street view.

That is the evidence from elevation and topography. There are two small, but important pieces of evidence from names. Tanners Pond Road has an obvious connection with water, but so does the name this road takes on from the mid-to south side of the village. Edgemere is an Anglo-Saxon word that means by the water’s edge. The road was probably named this because it skirted water or a marshy area.

Indeed, to the east of Edgemere Road is the golf course of the Garden City Country Club is two water courses and a connecting stream:

The pond to the north is filled with water, while the connecting stream and the pond to the south is dry. There is also a water filled pond to the east.

The water filled pond to the north has a culvert with exterior stone work that appears to run beneath Edgemere Rad to the north and info the pond. We can see it is it this photo:

And from above:

This pond has a more “natural” appearance in that the visible banks are deep, showing patterns of erosion that may be indicative of water flow.

The other pond to the east appears to be human made, or at least managed:

It has a raised berm and an aerator. In the dry pond to the south, there is a culvert leading out of the golf course:

It is extremely difficult to say if this culvert simply leads to water drains or continues as a water course to the south. There are suggestions that it does. South 2.3 miles is the Franklin Square Museum. On this property, a culvert emerges from the north:

This is the headwaters of Valley Stream Brook, which continues, with some dips under the ground, until it empties into Jamaica Bay:

I am not claiming that the valley at Tanners Pond Road, or the ponds at the Garden City Country Club are the sources of Valley Stream Brook. However, I believe the Tanners Valley is one of the seasonal brooks that once fed Valley Stream Brooks.

Garden City was built on the Hempstead Plains. This 60,000 acre grassland was formed by the outwash debris of the glacial hills to the north. Streams and creeks running south from these hills created the outwash, sandy plain that would become the Hempstead Plains.

In an article THE HEMPSTEAD PLAINS OF LONG ISLAND, by Roland M. Harper

In the journal Torreya, December, 1912, Vol. 12, No. 12 (December, 1912), pp. 277-287, the author discusses these ancient stream beds:

The surface of the Hempstead Plains, like the rest of the southern or unglaciated portion of Long Island, is for the most part very flat, and slopes gently southward at the rate of about one foot in 300. It ranges in altitude from about 60 to 200 feet above sea-level. Traversing the plain in a general north and south direction are a number of nearly straight broad shallow valleys, ten to twenty feet in depth, which are believed by geologists to have been formed by glacial streams and not by recent erosion. Within the limits of the prairie most of these valleys are now dry at all seasons, but farther south some of them contain permanent streams.”

In this same article, the author provides a photograph looking up from one of these dry valleys:

It is hard to get a sense of scale, but we are probably safe to say he is looking up from an incline similar to the one I show above.

The evidence points toward the Tanners Pond Road valley as not ever being a pond. In fact, a historical market in Garden City points to a different location for the pond:

Tanners Pond Rd. connected Courthouse Rd., which originated in Franklin Square, to the Tanner property [which had a pond], west of New Hyde Park Rd. and north of what is now Marcus Avenue near Lake Success.

If the information behind this sign is correct, then the road is named after the Tanner family, who had property to the north and west of the area that is currently named after them, and their pond. So, my second grade teacher was somewhat correct. There was a Tanner’s Pond, but it was named after a family, and not an occupation. It is also in the wrong area. Why, then, was this road called Tanners Pond Road. Did it continue to run north along what is now Denton and Marcus Avenue?

In the article from 1912 this bit of information is crucial: “Within the limits of the prairie most of these valleys are now dry at all seasons, but farther south some of them contain permanent streams.” This is exactly what occurs in the Tanner Valley. The valley is dry, but in the very south, those who created the golf course probably utilized the old stream bed and its occasion flow to build two, or possibly three ponds. Further south, as this valley feeds into Valley Stream Brook, the flowing water begins in fits and starts until it is the kind of permanent stream detailed in 1912.

This valley, and those like it, began to be formed 10,000 years ago. The Tanner Valley may be an old feature indeed.