FARMINGTON – Repair work on the Walton Mill Dam in West Farmington has been started. The town’s public works crew drained the pond in order to initiate repairs, Ronald Greenwood, who is directing the project, said on Wednesday.

An excavation crew is expected to begin work today starting with repairs to the west or south side, Greenwood said. That’s where concrete aprons have been broken. Sixty square yards of concrete will be poured in the area with a ton and a half of reinforcing steel, he said. Along with repairs to the sluice wall, a gate system will be developed to control the water level in the pond, he said.

While Greenwood is looking after the design work of the project, contracted crews will be used and the town’s crew will help where it can, he said.

The dam was built in 1820 and came under town ownership in 1977. An engineer’s inspection of the dam in 2004 found serious deterioration, including excessive seepage through the main spillway, sluice wall and north retaining wall.

This first part of the project, he said, will cost $32,000 but it’s more than a one-year project. An estimated time for completion of this phase will depend on the water.

“Heavy rains could slow us down,” he said, “but we’ll work until we can’t deal with the water.”

Greenwood, who has worked on the dam a couple of other times, said permission to build Walton Mill on Temple Stream was granted by general courts in England in 1765 prior to the American Revolution. The town was built around it, he said.

He can remember when there was a 190-foot-long covered bridge across the pond that connected to the road to Temple. It started beside the present site of the Franklin Journal building in West Farmington and came out in Mary Wright’s yard, he said. The top of the bridge was taken off in the 1920-1930s, he thought, and it stood with just the sides until ice hit a center pier and it was knocked down in 1949, he said.