Archive: Around Town

Town Historian Louise Bement was sorting through a pile of historical documents regarding the Cayuga Power Plant when she happened upon three photographs, facing down beneath the pile.  The photos were labeled 'Pozzolana Park' with little else to go on, except that the site had been used to safely store coal ash, presumably from what was, at the time, the Milliken Station power plant.  She hadn't heard of any public park of that name at any point in Lansing history.

"I thought, let's turn this over and see what it's all about," Bement says. "Now that Milliken is kind of in the news you pick up on it.  I thought, well now it's interesting."

The mystery was solved with the discovery of a 1976 Syracuse Herald-American article that chronicled the site.  The coal-fueled Milliken Station power plant was owned and operated by NYSEG since it went online in 1950 until it was sold to AES in 1998 (the company sold the plant to new owners in 2011).  NYSEG used the site to dispose of fly-ash, a byproduct of burning coal.  In 1975 Pozzolana Park was turned into -- not a park, but a grassy meadow in an effort to stabilize the ash pile while reclaiming the land.


The Lansingville property was named for a kind of volcanic ash, pozzolana, which has been used in underwater mortar and cement since at least ancient Roman times.  The substance was discovered at Pozzuoli, a town in southern Italy.  The Romans are known to have used it in the third century BC.  But that is not to say there were volcanoes in Lansing.  This Pozzolana Park site was actually a fly-ash disposal location in the 1970s, when NYSEG owned the power plant.  It had ditches and terraces dug into the property to divert water to insure that rainwater would not be contaminated.

NYSEG transformed the property into a meadow in 1975 at a cost of $348,000.  Drains were installed to stabilize the fly ash, and it was then covered with topsoil grasses.  A company official told the Herald-American the restoration would eliminate potential erosion.


The project was an early phase of ongoing land reclamation of fly-ash disposal sites, with the next phase involving a land purchase to hold a new 30-acre disposal site, that was also to be turned into meadow when it reached its capacity.


Today Pozzolana Park is covered with grass and trees, with a stunning view of nearby farms, and Cayuga Lake far in the distance.  The property is still owned and maintained by NYSEG, but is not open to the public.

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