In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

42 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c04 Four The Lake Lake Waramaug became a key focus for family memories. The lake, my mother or grandmother would say to people who couldn’t place it, is “about twenty-five miles north of Danbury.” People might know Danbury, Connecticut, because of its noted hat factories or its fair, which had begun modestly enough in 1821 and developed into a sort of lavish, intermittent amusement park and racetrack that drew people from miles around. The route north from Danbury went to New Milford, a pictureperfect New England town with a green that once graced a Saturday Evening Post cover, and then on to New Preston, once on a New Yorker cover, the village that sits virtually at the foot of the lake itself. The lake—at about seven-hundred acres, the second-largest natural lake in the state—zigzags through several coves and sits mostly ensconced by verdant hills that create a sort of bowl effect. The borders of three townships—Kent, Washington, and Warren—meet in the middle. Waramaug is said to mean “place of the good fishing” in the local Indian languages, though this refers not to the lake itself but to a spot below New Milford where the Great Falls impeded shad going up the Housatonic River at a certain time of year; hence, the fishing was good then and there. This was the place where Chief Waramaug, who died in 1735, had his “capital.” He took his name from the place, and the lake was within his territory; he placed lookouts atop The Pinnacle, a mountain that overlooks the lake, to watch for incursions by the powerful Mohawks farther west. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, white colonists began moving into the area to farm, evidently welcomed by Waramaug and his people as providing a useful barrier against the Mohawks. After his death, the lands around the lake were reserved for his people, but by 1738 these lands were being auctioned off to whites; villages and farmlands appeared and waterpowered mills popped up along the Aspetuck River after 1745. George The Lake 43 Washington passed through in 1781 on his way to the Hudson Valley, but what is really important for the Mulvehills and de Caros is that, after 1840, when the Housatonic Railroad opened a station at New Milford, the lake began progressing toward becoming a summer destination.1 In 1864 a family from—interestingly enough—Brooklyn found lodging at the Hopkins farm on the lake, and soon several boardinghouses were taking in guests. People began building summer houses. In the 1870s the Bonynge family from New Jersey visited the lake and made it their summer destination, staying at a place called Lakeview Farm. In 1898 they bought the farm and later built the house they called The Maples and that the Mulvehills would later buy from them. The house the de Caros rented was originally a farmhouse built around 1840. Probably sometime in the nineteenth century, a legend of Chief Waramaug’s daughter, Lillinonah, of whom there is no historical record, began to circulate: Lillinonah found a young white man lost in the woods, brought him home, and they fell in love and married. Later he went to visit his own people and did not return for so long that she despaired of his ever coming back and decided to pilot her canoe suicidally over the Great Falls. He returned just as she was doing so, leapt into the canoe with her, and they both plunged over the falls to their deaths. Great Falls became known as Lovers Leap (along with countless others in the United States with similar stories attached to them). I never actually heard this story told and did not sense any strong Native American connections to the lake. A family from Bridgeport built a mansion along the Housatonic on the site of Chief Waramaug’s grave in the 1890s, supposedly demolishing his grave marker and placing the house’s fireplace right on top of the grave itself. In the 1950s the Connecticut Light & Power Company created an artificial lake and named it Lillinonah.2 So much for the Indians, though in the twenty-first century, a Native American group laid claim to a large swath of Kent Township, to the surprise and consternation of local whites. Back in the twentieth century: The lake house (as a name, The Maples lived on somewhat desultorily with the Mulvehills, eventually passing out of use) was—and...

Share