Silver Lake, one of three by that name in Sullivan County, New York, United States, is located just southeast of the village of Woodridge. It was created in the 1840s when

Sandburg Creek Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg ...

was

dammed ''Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory'' is a 2020 book by Brittany Luby, Associate Professor of History at the University of Guelph. The book charts the impacts of the damming of the Winnipeg River in the Lake of ...

to provide reliable water for the "summit", or highest-elevation, section of the

Delaware and Hudson Canal The Delaware and Hudson Canal was the first venture of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, which would later build the Delaware and Hudson Railway. Between 1828 and 1899, the canal's barges carried anthracite coal from the mines of northeaster ...

, between

Wurtsboro Wurtsboro is a village located on U.S. Route 209 in the town of Mamakating in Sullivan County, New York, United States, near its junction with New York State Route 17 (which is being upgraded to interstate standards and will be renumbered as ...

and Napanoch. After the canal closed, the lake that had been created, initially called Woods Lake, became an attraction for guests at the Jewish summer resort communities in that area of the

Catskill Mountains The Catskill Mountains, also known as the Catskills, are a physiographic province of the larger Appalachian Mountains, located in southeastern New York. As a cultural and geographic region, the Catskills are generally defined as those areas c ...

. The lake is irregularly shaped, along a northwest-southeasterly axis roughly two-thirds of a mile long, in surface area when full. One bay on the south side is crossed by the former right-of-way of the Orange & Western Railroad; a stone

culvert A culvert is a structure that channels water past an obstacle or to a subterranean waterway. Typically embedded so as to be surrounded by soil, a culvert may be made from a pipe, reinforced concrete or other material. In the United Kingdom ...

underneath connects it with the main lake. The northwest end lies in the village of Woodridge, which has built a small park along the lake around a beach that established itself in the early resort days. Another beach developed at the opposite end, just north of the dam. There are some houses and businesses with lake frontage, but other than that its shores remain undeveloped. In 1999, water undermined some sections of the original dam and caused a breach, draining the lake to merely one-quarter its size. The village sought and received state and federal grants to repair the dam and restore the lake, whose near-absence had hurt local business. However, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the Conservation Commission's successor as regulator of dams, held up repairs while it considered whether to reclassify the dam as higher risk in case of failure, which could have raised the cost and forced a redesign. After eventually getting approval from DEC and putting the project out for bid, a redesign of the dam that preserved its historic character, the village suffered another setback when the lowest bid came back at $1.5 million, almost twice what the project had been budgeted for. The village is in the process of building a wastewater treatment plant that will discharge into the lake along the south side just past its park.,

Environmental Protection Agency A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...

; January 30, 2009. In 2006, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had obtained a consent decree requiring that the village address the sewage spills that frequently occurred in heavy rains. It had been using a Town of Fallsburg plant some distance from the village, but that hadn't been enough.

References

{{authority control Reservoirs in New York (state) Fallsburg, New York Reservoirs in Sullivan County, New York 1840s establishments in New York (state)