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…