In March, the Friends of Mill Pond will sponsor Celebrating the Mill Pond: Sustaining Serenity Together, a delusional, misbegotten, month-long “community awareness campaign” to support maintaining the artificial impoundment that harms Mill Brook. The effort is based on the myth that the impoundment is vital to West Tisbury’s rural identity.

A West Tisbury Library exhibition of solicited artwork, “both contemporary and historic — reflecting Mill Pond’s beauty at the Island’s crossroads,” will celebrate the 17th-century impoundment created by an enterprising colonial merchant who harnessed the free-flowing stream to power a grist mill.

In 1809, a new owner converted the mill into a wool-processing factory. He needed substantial water flow to generate more power, so he built a dam. There was no Martha’s Vineyard Commission to consider that blocking a stream that flowed through the heart of the Island to Tisbury Great Pond would allow sediment to build up. There was no Vineyard Conservation Society to mobilize citizens to protect populations of herring and American eels that had sustained the Island’s Wampanoag inhabitants and the native brook trout that dated to the last ice age. And there was no Prudy Burt of West Tisbury, a singular voice who has argued on behalf of the stream’s unique cold-water habitat for more than 20 years.

By 1870, according to Martha’s Vineyard Museum research librarian A. Bowdoin Van Riper, “the growing availability of less-expensive mainland-made textiles on the Island drove the mill out of business in the 1870s.” But the centuries-old obsolete dam and the Mill Pond impoundment that impede once lively, free-flowing Mill Brook remain 155 years later.

The Friends of Mill Pond want community awareness to remain anchored in both the continuing disfigurement of the brook and a historical delusion. The lovely images dear to the hearts of the Friends encourage the notion that somehow the pond is other than what it is: namely, an integral part of Mill Brook.

Environmental reports paint a bleaker picture of the struggling brook. In its most recent report to the West Tisbury select board on Dec. 4, the Mill Brook Watershed Management Committee said Mill Pond’s summer dissolved oxygen “is below acceptable levels one-third of the time.”

Seasonal water temperatures in the pond and various impoundments along Mill Brook, beginning with its headwaters at the Roth Woodlands in Chilmark, where an impoundment reaches close to 90 degrees in August, regularly exceed the temperature limit for coldwater fisheries and certain aquatic macroinvertebrates.

A 2011 study by the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration (DER) study says the pond’s average depth is two feet, with the deepest part six feet near the dam pond outlet. Centuries of trapping sediment have left the pond bottom covered in a significant layer of “organic muck.”

The report estimated the cost of dredging the pond to be approximately $500,000 and the cost of removing the dam higher. A less expensive option would be to remove the boards, which would “be an appropriate approach to initiating a process intended to foster constructive discussions on the potential long-term benefits of aquatic resource restoration at this site.”

DER has been involved in over 65 dam removals since 2005, with approximately 40 in the last 10 years. It has funded more than 100 culvert replacement projects around the state, including the long-stalled Sheriff’s Meadow Roth Woodlands project — 11 years and counting.

Asked what she’s learned from these restoration projects, DER director Beth Lambert says, “Brooks and streams recover quickly from past damage when stressors like dams are removed.... The former impoundment greens up within the first growing season, and for those who witness the results, seeing a river or wetland recover from past damage brings hope, a sense of accomplishment, and a visceral reminder that taking action can lead to positive change.”

Entomologist Greg Whitmore, whose 2022/2023 Mill Brook biomonitoring study underpinned the watershed management committee report, said the notion that because the pond supports an ecosystem and has historical value it should be preserved misses the fact that a pond that is commonplace is supplanting something unique.

“This four-mile-long stretch of cold water on a literal sandbar in the middle of the ocean is such a rare thing, to begin with,” he said, “and I look at Mill Pond, and it’s just such a shame that it’s there. It’s such a waste of something that could be wonderful.”

Mr. Whitmore says that if all the impoundments were removed, Mill Brook would revert to a coldwater stream for its entire length.

“Centuries of sediment would be swept downstream; riffle habitat would return. Brook trout would have unimpeded access from the headwaters to Tisbury Great Pond . . . . Overall, the health of the entire Mill Brook ecosystem would drastically improve.”

The notion that those arguing for restoration are only interested in creating a trout stream is misleading. Dams restrict natural migrations, affecting species distribution and reproduction.

Delicate and beautiful native brook trout are as important an indicator of a healthy environment and a part of our natural heritage as the osprey that feed on returning herring each spring in Town Cove, where Mill Brook empties into Tisbury Great Pond.

Nostalgia and aesthetics underpin the argument for preserving the pond. The impoundment, created centuries ago to turn a water wheel, is no more a part of our environment than the rows of industrial-size wind turbines generating electrical power now blinking off our coast.

Nelson Sigelman lives in Vineyard Haven.