Carsonia Park was a placid scene on a recent summer morning.
A far cry from its heyday — the site was home to an amusement park from 1896 to 1950 — the Lower Alsace Township property was quite quiet on the warm summer day. A few fishermen watched their lines that were cast into Crystal Lake; a pair of children smiled as they fed some baby ducks. A gaggle of geese napped in the grass.
The only noticeable noise was a loud buzz cutting through the stillness from the south end of the lake. There, a team of three workers from Delaware-based Brightfields, Inc. were carefully using a chain saw to cut down a patch of small trees and trim some low-hanging branches.
They were clearing the way for an even noisier endeavor, making room for an excavator that about an hour later would be fired up and put into action. It was used to smash an old, concrete footbridge.
That bridge had fallen into disrepair, sinking into the ground and becoming severely tilted.
“It’s a bridge that was not very well engineered,” said Jay Worrall, chair of the Recreation Commission of the Antietam Valley. “It’s very old and probably never really served its purpose very well.”
The demolition and replacement of the bridge is part of some upgrade work taking place at Carsonia Park this summer. Expected to take about six weeks to complete, the work includes relocating a portion of trail that is too close to the lake, Worrall said.
Worrall said the improvements are being done to increase accessibility at the park.
“There improvements are primarily for ADA concerns,” he said, referencing the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. “We want to make sure that all kinds of people with all kinds of mobility can enjoy Carsonia Park.”
Worrall said the project is mostly addressing what he called deferred maintenance, things that should have been taken care of years ago. It will cost about $180,000 and is being funded by Lower Alsace Township, Mount Penn, the Antietam Valley Community Partnership, the Mount Penn Borough Municipal Authority and the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
The bridge and trail project represents the completion of a portion of a Carsonia Park master plan that was created following a series of public meetings in 2014. Other projects already completed as part of the plan included building new basketball courts, a multi-use court and a parking lot, as well as upgrading playground equipment and creating an informational kiosk.
Worrall said the upgrades are essential because of the park’s importance to recreation in the area.
“It’s really the only public recreation area in the Antietam Valley,” he said. “Aside from small playgrounds at the schools, there are no public recreation facilities, no playgrounds. None of those things exist in Mount Penn or Lower Alsace.”
Worrall said other upgrades to the park, including some landscaping improvements, may be coming. The recreation commission will likely kick off fundraising efforts for those projects this year, he said.
Source: Berkshire mont