Pic(k) of the Week: Echo Lake arcadia

Click on the image for a larger, hi-res version (on Flickr).

A wooden fence and woodland suggest a picturesque rural location. Appearances can be deceiving. They're actually within the front yard of a house in a densely populated suburb of Metro Atlanta.

DeKalb County (Oak Grove), Georgia, USA.
24 August 2026.

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Geographical/historical note

Unseen in the image, there's a small, unnamed creek just beyond the fence. To left of frame, it flows under a suburban street into Echo Lake, an 18-acre private residential impoundment lake.

Echo Lake was built in 1938 by the Soil Conservation Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Congress passed a law establishing the SCS in 1935 stating, “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands is a menace to the national welfare.” It was a massive national effort with most of the work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Five lakes were built with earthen dams to control flooding and prevent soil erosion in tributaries of North Fork Peachtree Creek. At the time, this was a rural area of forests and farms. Today, only Echo Lake and a smaller remain.

— EchoLakeGa.org (accessed 2021).

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Art Pepper: Goodbye, Again.

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• Album: One September Afternoon
  Label: Galaxy (Recorded: 1980 | Released: 1981)
  
• Musicians:
  
  • Art Pepper - alto saxophone, leader
  • Stanley Cowell - piano, composer
  • Cecil McBee - bass
  • Carl Burnett - drums

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• Pic(k) of the Week: one in a weekly series of images posted on Saturdays.
• Photo 35 of 52, for year 2026. See a larger, hi-res version on Flickr: here.


• Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10 II.
• Lens: Olympus M.40-150mm F4.0-5.6 R
• Settings: 53 mm | 1/400 sec | ƒ/5.6 | ISO 400.
• Edit: Photoshop Elements 15, Nik Collection (2016).


• Image licensed via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Reproduction permitted, but with these provisos:
  • only in unadapted form
  • attribution required (e.g., Cizauskas on Flickr)
  • commercial use forbidden except with explicit permission.
  
  
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