Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Meeting Pond Neighbors

We recently purchased property that has a small pond... well, half of a small pond. the neighbors to the south have the southern end of the pond on their property. I would very much like to meet them and find out what they know of the history of this pond (they have lived there for many years!). I drafted this letter. How would you feel getting this letter in the mail?


Would love your fellow pond owning/loving thoughts!

I love you, man.

I am surrounded by subdivisions on two sides (the long ones). We spent twenty years with the first one running cattle in Winter pasture next to it, having my wife's Sheriff's Deputy nephew and his partners shoot 500+ rounds at a time on my rifle range, and running large tractors as late as midnight to get the bordering neighbors switched to ones who actually want to live in the country. (The one closest to our house, who is into dirt track racing and tunes his race car up outside, once told me that the rest of the subdivision hates him more than they hate me.)

We are attempting to be proactive with the newest subdivision, by placing the following sign facing each building lot:

I think your proposed letter is fine.

I did have another thought about it though. I think the first order of need is to meet or talk to your new neighbors for general purposes. So I would focus on just getting that opportunity to meet/talk, and not emphasize anything about the pond in the letter. Once you do meet/talk to them, you can then ask questions about many things including the pond.

Ideally, when talking about shared ownership of a body of water, it's probably best if the other owners don't really care about the pond so that you are free to do as you choose with the pond. As such, I wouldn't want to state my own strong interest in the pond until I got a sense of what the new neighbors are like; if they are not such great people, then I'd want them to know less about my own interests.

Out here on the rural route, we have a saying, "good fences make good neighbors".

The pond has been there since the early 1950s or so (not on 1930s map, but is on the 1955 map). It seems to have a slightly shallow area where the 2 properties meet, but really its all one pond. The natural spring is on our land, but they owned that land just to the south for many years before we purchased last Dec. Our half (or so) is crazy over grown with trees, vines of all sorts and scrub. They have cleared the edged around their pond. Our half has large clumps of saw grass, they they just a small section of saw grass. So, they have done something with it. And I've seen cows drinking from it at times, but not all the time. There is a good fence between us and them, so I'm not worried about cows coming north onto our property. But I don't want to do a bunch of work and then have them do something that completely wonks it all out. I'd rather already have a good relationship going before something goes wrong. Our properties back up to each other, but the fronts are a good 5 to 10 minute drive to get around from one to the other. And, *covid*, so I thought a letter might go over better than me marching up to their door to say hi.

You could just go knock on their door and introduce yourself.