By Billy Baker, The Boston Globe IPSWICH – Typically, what stands out in Ipswich are the historic colonial homes. The town proudly boasts more surviving First Period houses than anywhere else in the country. But over the last several weeks, the dominant visual in Ipswich has been lawn signs, hundreds and hundreds of them, pitting neighbor against neighbor ahead of a controversial vote that has consumed the 13,000 residents of this Great Marsh community.
The debate, as spelled out on the lawn signs, is binary: “ ” or “ .” On May 21, town voters will go to the polls to decide whether to remove the Ipswich Mills Dam that, in some form of another, has been in the center of town on the Ipswich River since 1637. The current seven-foot-high dam, built in 1880 and later modified to power a neighboring hosiery mill, has not been in hydroelectric use since the 1930s.
Today, the dam does two things. It blocks migratory fish and the ocean tides from going upstream. And the impoundment creates a one-mile reservoir of fresh water known as Mill Pond that has become a favorite spot for swimming, flat-water paddling and, when the weather allows, ice skating.
So the question for voters is: keep things the way they are, or return this stretch of river to its original free-flowing state? It has been a discussion that’s been going on since 2012, when the town — which owns the dam, and had financial concerns about future upkeep and liability — convened stakeholders to explore optio.