For most Cantabrigians, Fresh Pond is a natural resource, providing drinking water and green space to the city. For centuries, the Indigenous peoples who lived here used the pond and its environs for fishing, hunting and collecting rushes, marsh hay and clay deposits – activities that the English colonists who arrived in the 17th century adopted. At various points in the pond’s history, people (and dogs) have swum in it, rowed on it and played golf on its shores.
During times of war, Fresh Pond has also served as a refuge from the fighting and as a training ground for soldiers preparing for battle. On April 19, 1775, when Cambridge was anticipating the fallout from the militia’s engagement with British troops at Lexington and Concord, the city’s women and children were sent to the shores of Fresh Pond to shelter from the violence they feared would follow, as the redcoats retraced their steps through Cambridge on their way back to Boston. Hannah Winthrop described the scene at Fresh Pond that day as she and others sought to “retire to some place of safety [from] British barbarity.” In a letter to a friend, Winthrop writes, “what a distressed house did we find there, filled with seventy or eighty weeping and agonizing women, whose husbands had gone forth to meet the assailants.” Three Cambridge men were killed that day in a skirmish with the British at Watson’s Corner, but all of the women and children who fled to Fresh Pond remained safe.
As the Revolution progressed, and general George Washington arrived in Cambridge in July 1775 to take command of the Continental Army, Fresh Pond again played an important role. Although the redcoats posed the most visible threat to the American forces, the spread of smallpox was threatening to decimate the army from within. Soon after his arrival in Cambridge, Washington established a smallpox hospital on the shores of Fresh Pond to isolate soldiers infected with the virus. To keep transmission to a minimum, he ordered all healthy individuals – military and civilian – to stay away from the pond and not to fish, boat or swim there.
During the Civil War, Cambridge was the first city in the nation to raise a company of volunteers to come to the aid of the Union. Although a formal declaration of war was not issued until April 1861, the Cambridge Chronicle reported in January of that year that “our friend and neighbor, J.P. Richardson, Esq., has opened a recruiting office, and proposes to organize a company of volunteers to tender their services to the President of our common country.” By the end of January, the Chronicle reported that Richardson “has enlisted thirty-four volunteers for the military company which he proposes to raise in Cambridge. The number desired is fifty, which number doubtless will readily be obtained. He has the promise of the Governor that if any companies are sent South to quell the revolt this company shall be one.”
Richardson’s organizing efforts were successful, and several other Cambridge men stepped up to form their own companies, many before the war had officially begun.
By the time the Confederate forces fired on South Carolina’s Fort Sumter in April 1861, Cambridge was well prepared to send troops to the battle front. The Massachusetts First Regiment of Infantry needed temporary accommodations as they prepared to be called to action; they spent a few days quartered at Faneuil Hall, but it could not accommodate the nearly 1,000 men in the regiment, so Massachusetts authorities took possession of an unused ice house on the eastern shore of Fresh Pond as a soldiers’ barracks. The regiment arrived in Cambridge on June 1, 1861, and named the site Camp Ellsworth after colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a good friend of president Abraham Lincoln who was the first Union officer to die in the war. The camp’s location was convenient and offered unlimited bathing, hot water and access to the rest of the city by railroad and horse cars, but it soon became apparent that the barracks were exceedingly damp and poorly ventilated, and the company began to look for other accommodations. After less than two weeks at Camp Ellsworth, the regiment moved to Camp Cameron, about a mile away in North Cambridge.
Fresh Pond served again as a military installation during World War I. After the United States entered the war in April 1917, the Harvard ROTC program established a training ground at the pond, where student recruits practiced grenade-throwing and other skills; several French commanders who had been injured and would not return to combat were sent to the Harvard program to train the cadets, sharing what they had learned about the system of trench warfare that was a hallmark of the First World War in Europe.
“The throwing of hand grenades were taken up for the first time by the corps this week at the system of trenches at Fresh Pond. Work in this line is done under the French officers,” a July 1917 Cambridge Tribune article announced. The Chronicle reported in July that many “men prominent in military departments are to come to this city during the next two weeks of training to inspect the trenches, which are an exact pattern of those used on the western front. Wednesday the second battalion spent the entire day in the trenches, practicing the establishment of communication systems and of forming relieving companies to take the places of those who have been wearied of the trench work.”
By the end of August, nearby residents were viewing the training camp at Fresh Pond with awe and trepidation. The Cambridge Sentinel stated that “Folks up Huron avenue way are holding their ears in readiness to survive the explosion which is to occur when the famous and unique trenches dug by the Harvard brigade near Fresh Pond are mined for destruction … On a given day, when all is in readiness and the reserve officers are on hand for their practical experience, a bomb will be touched off and the section of the trench blown up.” In October 1917, secretary of war Newton Baker and a number of other prominent military and civic leaders paid a visit to the camp, remarking that “their work is of high military value, and said that the camp was supplying the army with well trained men.” The camp continued to be used for training through the end of the war in November 1918, after which Harvard complied with the Cambridge Water Board’s request to restore the grounds of Fresh Pond, including filling in the trenches, at a cost of $1,570 – into today’s dollars, around $32,166.
Although Fresh Pond has most often been seen by those in and around Cambridge as a place of natural beauty, its role in three major wars is an important if largely overlooked part of its history. Whether as a refuge from battle and a smallpox hospital during the Revolution, a soldiers’ barracks during the Civil War or a training ground during World War I, the shores of Fresh Pond have served the Cambridge community as a military as well as a recreational resource.
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