Place Where You Live:

Spencer, New York

Nestled in the southern Finger Lakes region of central New York, an area known for its wineries, is a small and shrinking town known as Spencer, not known for its wineries. This town is approximately 200 years old, although it’s fairly modern architecture does not suggest as much. To me this is my home, and always will be my home. Spencer isn’t what you’d call a “large” town, having fairly small population of roughly 2,500 people. Back in the 80s and 90s the town actually used to be a little bit bustling, despite its size, when it had a Ford dealership and a Chevy dealership right across from each other on the main intersection of town. Then population of the town began to shrink, the dealerships left the area, along with most of the town’s business, a few years after I was born. One of the few attractions left in the town is what seems to be the center of our town, Nichols’ Park. Now the actual area of the park isn’t that large, with half the park being taken up by this part swamp, part pond conglomerate that we locals refer to as Nichols’ Pond. A few years ago there was a restoration project for the pond. Prior to my lifetime there had been no ecological thought put into what people did with the ponds, and it was so polluted that the few species of fish that could actually thrive in the pond had begun to die out. Seeing this the entire community began to raise funds to help in some way with the failing health of the ponds ecosystem. The end result of this actually was the creation of a Nichols Pond Committee, which ended up dredging the pond to remove excess natural sediment and also solid pollutants that people had put into the water, such as plastics or metal. This dredging actually benefited the ecosystem of the pond, resulting in a greater diversity of wildlife in and around the pond, not to mention the aspect of beautification that it now brings to the center of our town.