How did Mont Vernon’s Jew Pond get its name?

Thursday, July 7, 2011

This shows a portion of a map printed in the "The Golden Days", a history of Mont Vernon's summer-hotel era that ended in 1933. It shows names have been associated with Jew Pond over the years.

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Staff photo by Bob Hammerstrom
Facebook: Bob Hammerstrom at The Nashua Telegraph
The official sign at Carleton Park Recreation Area in Mont Vernon doesn't give the name Jew Pond. Photo taken July 1, 2011.

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Staff photo by Bob Hammerstrom
The rustic sign at the entrance to George Carleton Park doesn't bear the name of the tiny pond in the background, which has been known as Jew Pond for years.

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Staff photo by Bob Hammerstrom
Facebook: Bob Hammerstrom at The Nashua Telegraph
Jew Pond in Mont Vernon is created by the small dam shown at right. Photo taken July 1, 2011.

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Staff photo by Bob Hammerstrom
Facebook: Bob Hammerstrom at The Nashua Telegraph
The overflow culvert from Jew Pond in Mont Vernon, Friday, July 1, 2011.

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Staff photo by Bob Hammerstrom
Jew Pond in Mont Vernon is created by the small dam at left. Voters decided Tuesday night to rename the pond, but left it up to selectmen to decide on a name.

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The United State Geological Survey map shows that "Jew Pond" is the official name of a small body of water in the center of Mont Vernon. It appears on the map known as the New Boston Quadrangle.

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The 1971 Mont Vernon town report notes the donation to town of 5 acres around Jew Pond, creating Carleton Park.

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This shows a portion of a map printed in the "The Golden Days", a history of Mont Vernon's summer-hotel era that ended in 1933. It shows names have been associated with Jew Pond over the years.

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The possibility that quarter-acre Jew Pond might get a new name was launched by town resident Rich Masters, who submitted a request to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names asking that it become Frog Pond.

He says he made the request largely to get the discussion started, and isn’t locked into that name.

The Board of Geographic Names is run by the federal U.S. Geological Survey. They’re the folks who, for example, say that one much-debated peak in the White Mountains is Mount Clay and not Mount Reagan.

They have the authority to rename Jew Pond without local consent, although they take local opinions into consideration.

Masters’ request triggered a process in which input is being sought from a number of New Hampshire state groups as well as the town Board of Selectmen and county government.

Individuals can comment directly, through various methods.

Comments can be sent by email to bgnexec@usgs.gov (that address stands for Board of Government Names Executive council at U.S. Geological Survey).

Comments can also be mailed to:

US Board on Geographic Names, US Geological Survey

Geographic Names Office

12201 Sunrise Valley Drive MS523cq

Reston, VA 20191-0523

For more information on how places are named, check the web site:

http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/index.html

– DAVID BROOKS

MONT VERNON – The debate over whether to rename Jew Pond has raised a question: How did a tiny, man-made watering hole, located in a town that has never had any Jewish community, get a name like that anyway?

The answer: It was a sort of joke designed to deflate the pretensions of Jewish hotel owners from Boston, who wanted to call the pond Lake Serene as a tourist lure. Their idea fizzled but the local name stuck.

At least, that’s probably what happened. Anybody who needs written records for confirmation will be disappointed, because the naming of small water bodies has long been an informal process.

“Whoever owned the land named the pond. They got just called by whoever owned the land,” said Keith Pomeroy, Historical Society president, ticking off several bodies of water in the area that have had multiple names over the decades as properties have changed hands.

This isn’t surprising because naming things was an informal process until surprisingly recently. For example, it wasn’t until the 1953 annual meeting that Mont Vernon officially named its roads.

The town report that year lists 29 names from Main Street to Purgatory Road, in a process designed to help fire departments that were increasingly manned by newcomers who might not know where to find places with casual names, like Perham Corner.

Nobody ever did the same thing for water bodies, however.

As a 20-year resident of town and member of the Historical Society, I have tried to pin down the origin of the name, but searching through records at the Mont Vernon Historical Society museum or the online collection of old maps maintained by UNH finds little in the way of documentation.

The earliest recorded name that I could find is the unimaginative “Spring Pond,” on a map in a brochure for the Grand Hotel. The brochure is undated but was put out by owner George Bates during the hotel’s heydey, which probably dates it between the 1890s and 1920s.

The Grand was by far the largest of the many summer hotels that drew crowds of people who took the train to Milford and then a stage up the steep Mont Vernon hill to escape the Boston summer heat for a month or two. The town flourished as a summer haven for decades, and did it in style: The Grand held huge masquerade balls, and hundreds of people gathered for regular celebrations at Upper Purgatory Falls.

But the arrival of the automobile gave people more options and spending all summer in one location became passe. By 1933, all the town’s hotels were closed and most, including the Grand, had burned down.

Bates, the businessman who owned the Grand during most of its 35 years of existence, made Spring Pond by damming a small creek a few hundred yards from where the Grand stood. It was partly fed by runoff from up an adjoining slope. The slope now holds a corn field but at one time was part of a nine-hole golf course for visitors.

Calling it a pond was a stretch. “It was just a bog, really,” said Roberta Wilkins, Historical Society member and long-time town resident, who married into the family that owns the eighth-generation Wilkins Lumber Co. in Milford.

Bates didn’t mind a bit of a stretch to lure borders. His brochures, for example, said the hotel was 1,100 feet above sea level, almost 300 feet higher than reality. (The brochures also bragged “malaria totally unknown,” serving as a reminder of how times have changed.)

It seems that the name Jew Pond arrived after the Grand hit hard times.

According to a history of the town’s hotels, in 1927 Bates sold the Grand to H.N. Kolodny and G.M. Levenson, “young lawyers from Boston” who “intended to make the Grand a resort catering to an exclusively Jewish clientele.”

This was not uncommon procedure at the time, since many hotels and resorts didn’t allow Jews. Ironically, that included the Grand at least part of the time: One of the its brochures in the Historical Society collection says pointedly: “Hebrew patronage not desired.”

While Kolodny and Levenson owned the Grand, they dredged out Spring Pond, making it bigger and nicer, and renamed it Lake Serene to lure city folks. That fancy term didn’t go over so well in town.

“The natives laughed. They dubbed it Jew Pond,” said Wilkins.

Kolody and Levenson’s plan never got going and in less than two years they had given up. Bates bought the hotel back at auction on Oct. 14, 1929, but it was struck by lightning the next year and burned to the ground.

The hotel may be gone but the name Jew Pond stuck.

However, it hasn’t stuck very loudly.

In 1953, for example, the U.S. Geological Survey topographic map, which gives the official names for geographic features, had no name for the pond at all. Exactly when USGS started using “Jew Pond” is, alas, unclear: The service’s online listing for Jew Pond says “no data found” in terms of its history.

In my 20 years in Mont Vernon, I never heard anybody use the name until last year, when an algae bloom and subsequent Telegraph article drew attention to the name. Further, so far as I can tell, the name doesn’t exist on any current map other than the U.S. Geological Survey map of the area.

Jew Pond does show up in some town histories. It is listed, but not described, in “Historic Mont Vernon Vol. 1 - Households,” published by the historical society, and it also shows up on a map printed in the society’s 1994 “Golden Days,” which gives a history of the town’s summer hotels.

As a reflection of the how water body names change, that “Golden Days” map calls it “Jew Pond / Lake Serene / Spring Pond/ Carelton Pond.”

That last name is the only one I ever heard used, until recently.

It comes from 1972, when five acres around the pond was donated to the town by the Carleton family to create a park.

The town report from that year shows the pond on the back cover and says “the area commonly known as Jew Pond will now be known as the George O. Carleton Park.” The flyers with the Aug 20, 1972, dedication of the park note that “Jew Pond was created in the 1920s as an added attraction to aid a declining hotel era.”

The sign at the pond names Carleton Park, but says nothing about Jew Pond.

The pond has been improved since that dedication. Wilkins says her late husband helped dredge it again a half-century ago, and the knee-high dam was improved when the fire department installed a dry hydrant a number of years ago.

It is regularly used for fishing by kids (nobody under 16 is allowed to fish there) and ice skating. Nobody swims or wades in it, since it’s only a few feet deep pretty murky.

Since attention was drawn to the pond by an algae bloom last year, brush has been cleared and paths improved so that people can walk all around it.

Whether those changes will ever include a new name remains to be seen.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.