Wenham Lake

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Wenham Lake.
Wenham Lake.
Map of Wenham Lake, 1897, showing railways used to transport Wenham ice.
Map of Wenham Lake, 1897, showing railways used to transport Wenham ice.

Wenham Lake (224 acres), also known as Wenham Pond or Wenham Great Pond, is a lake located in Wenham, Massachusetts at 42°35′34.85″N, 70°53′35.72″W (elevation 32 feet). In the 1800s the lake was famous for its ice, reputed to be Queen Victoria's favorite. Today it is a water supply operated by the Salem and Beverly Water Supply Board.

Although Native Americans probably lived around Wenham Lake before European settlements in 1635, no such traces have been found. The lake first appears in recorded history in 1638, when Hugh Peters, the Puritan minister of the First Church of Salem, delivered a sermon to a small group of colonists on its shore. His sermon turned upon "Enon, near Salem, because there was much water there," a biblical reference to John 3:23. The small village at that spot was thus named Enon, but in 1643 was renamed Wenham.

In early colonial times, alewife fishing was an important part of the economy, and Wenham Lake was the region's main alewife spawning ground via the Miles River, which in turn joins the Ipswich River. Alewife harvests continued to be important until the 1800s, when dam construction on the Ipswich River ended the trade.

The transatlantic ice trade began in the 1840s, with the first ice cargo arriving in England in 1844 from Wenham Lake. The Landers family, owners of the lake's first ice house, constructed a railroad spur to help transport ice; one of its builders was Grenville Mullen Dodge, later to become famous as a Major General in the Union Army and central in the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Its roadbed is still visible directly behind the fifth hole at Lakeview Golf Course.

The ice business continued until at least 1912, when John C. Kelleher founded Beverly Ice Company to harvest the lake's ice. Its end came shortly afterwards, however, as Wenham Lake was set aside as a water reservoir for Salem and Beverly Water Supply Board (established 1913). Today Wenham Lake is integrated into the local water distribution system. Water is first pumped from the Ipswich River to the Danvers (Putnamville) Reservoir, then to Wenham Lake via the Salem Beverly Waterway Canal, thence to a treatment plant in Beverly and the Beverly Reservoir. From there it is pumped to some 80,000 consumers by the cities of Salem and Beverly, which operate separate water systems.

In 2001, the Wenham Lake Watershed Association discovered significant contamination of the lake from large deposits of fly ash dating from the 1950s and 1960s. These deposits totaled about 7,800 cubic yards, and were more than 3 feet deep in some locations. Their origin was the nearby Vitale dump, an abandoned gravel and sand quarry that had illegally stored refuse from coal burned at the Salem Harbor Power Generating Station. In subsequent years the lake has been dredged and is now monitored for its longterm health.

[edit] References and further reading

  • Some fly ash will remain in Wenham Lake, Marc Fortier, Staff writer, Salem News, November 14, 2003.
  • Wenham Lake Watershed Association
  • Phillips, John C., Wenham Great Pond, Salem Massachusetts: Peabody Museum, 1938.
  • Smith, Philip Chadwick Foster, Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness: The Development of the Massachusetts Ice Trade from Frederick Tudor to Wenham Lake, Wenham Historical Association, 1962.
  • Weightman, Gavin, The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story, Hyperion, 2004. ISBN 0-7868-8640-4.

[edit] See also

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