SMALL TOWNS FIND SLOW SLOW SAND A SOURCE FOR SPARKLING CLEAN WATER.(LIFE & LEISURE)

Byline: PAUL GRONDAHL - Staff writer

Wyeth might have painted this scene.

On this panoramic plateau high above the Mohawk Valley, the Amish transport milk pails with horse and buggy and the grazing Holsteins have the view to themselves.

Amid this 19th-century landscape, a spider's web of steel reinforcing bar pokes the sky from a $1.7 million water filtration plant for the village of Fort Plain in Montgomery County, expected to be completed this fall.

The land was purchased from an Amish dairy farmer. The plant is not out of character in the pastoral setting.

Instead of a high-tech facility with pumps and gauges and chemical treatments, Fort Plain has opted for an ancient system of filtering water that re-creates nature's way of cleansing water by allowing it to percolate slowly through what is essentially a giant sandbox -- a process known as "slow sand" filtration.

"This is a 'Back-to-the-Future' system," says John Cunnan, senior sanitary engineer with the state Health Department. "We looked at a lot of systems, but we didn't find anything better than slow sand. The more we learn, the more we realize how smart the old-timers were."

The plant will serve the 2,400 residents of Fort Plain and the 700 people who live in the hamlet of Nelliston just across the Mohawk River.

It promises to bring an end to Fort Plain's era of so-called "Beaver …