You said recently Round Pond is unusual. Why is that?
Round Pond, one of the few natural bodies of water in Ridgefield, is, at 32 acres, the second largest. At 778 feet above sea level, it is also the highest. But that’s not what makes it unusual.
Round Pond is so called because it is rather round in shape. That shape comes from the geologic formation that created it — a kind of “fluvioglacial landform,” as glaciologists would put it.
Round Pond fills a “kettle.” Kettles were created when a glacier receded, leaving occasional large isolated masses of buried ice. As the ice gradually melted and the ground above it slowly sank, a bowl-like depression formed. Here, a spring or springs and a relatively small watershed has filled the bowl with water.
The pond had its name at least by 1721 when it was mentioned in the settlers’ third purchase from the Indians. Its early uses included a source of stored water for at least one sawmill, and as a place to fish.
Apparently, however, by 1817, the pond was being fished out. In the Ridgefield’s first recorded effort at conservation, the Town Meeting that spring voted “that no person or persons shall draw any sein or seins, use or employ any hook, pot, or other implement by which fish are or may be caught or taken, in the Round Pond, so called … for the term of two years from and after the 1st day of April, AD 1817, under penalty of $10 for every fish so taken or caught.” A year later, the fishing ban was extended indefinitely.
Early in the 20th Century, the pond was one of several ponds used as a source of ice for the community’s ice boxes. An ice house existed on its shore as late as 1927.
It was in the early 1900s that the spring-fed pond became a reservoir for the Ridgefield Water Supply Company. At that time virtually no houses stood in its watershed. Today, there are some, most of them built in the Eight Lakes subdivision.
In the 1990s, Aquarion, which bought Ridgefield Water, stopped using it as a reservoir because it would be too expensive to build a purification plant that new federal regulations required. Instead, Aquarion piped water to town from the Saugatuck, Aspetuck and Hemlock reservoirs.
In October 2004, Round Pond became state property, part of the “Centennial Watershed State Forest” that includes 15,000 acres the state acquired from Aquarion, largely in other counties.
At the turn of the century, someone tried to take the Round out of the Pond, renaming it “Lake Oreneca,” apparently feeling “Round” lacked class. Fortunately, the effort didn’t succeed and Ridgefielders stuck to the age-old name.
There has also been no luck for those who would call it “Round Lake.” At 32 acres, a “lake” it’s not.