Nearly every kid who grew up in Yarmouth Port has fond memories of days spent at Dennis Pond. In the summer we’d walk or ride our bikes there, bumping over the railroad tracks, and set up a towel on the beach with a radio set to the top music station of the day, swim out to the raft, wait for the ice cream truck to arrive and put pennies on the track when we heard a train coming. The wheels would flatten out the coins. Turtle Rock was also a fun place to gather away from the crowds if you could find the path through the woods. In winter we’d meet there on the weekends for ice skating, hot cocoa waiting in a thermos to warm us. So why is it called Dennis Pond when it’s located in Yarmouth?

The pond got its name from an early settler of the area, Robert Dennis, a carpenter by trade. Because his name appears on early documents, we know he was in Yarmouth by 1641 and was a well respected citizen given multiple responsibilities. In 1648 Myles Standish assigned him 33 acres of the “west field” which abutted the pond, in the division of lands. Robert and his wife Mary lived there until about 1667 when it is believed they moved to what would become New Jersey.

After many of the trees were harvested in the area for building and firewood, land south of the pond became farmland and pasture for livestock. In fact Summer Street was known alternatively as Cow Lane and Hawes Lane prior to about 1880 because animals were driven down the lane to drink and feed.

A view of Dennis Pond, late 1800s. You can see the beach at left and pasture land beyond,

During the early 1800s two families of color lived on the south side of the pond. One man was an escaped slave named Jonah who made and lived in a roofed over dugout in the side of Prospect Hill (left in above photo). Information on him, other than his name, is difficult to find, other than a reference or two in the Yarmouth Register. Another family were children of a former slave named “Forten” or Fortune. Purchased and owned by a member of the Homer family in Hockanom (near Bray Farm), Fortune entered an agreement in 1776 to work seven years for his freedom and after completing that indenture contract he changed his name to Thomas Peters. He died in his 90s in 1831 at which point his daughters Phebe (and her husband) and Patty purchased land by the pond where they built a small cabin. Phebe’s daughter, Isabel Stokes, remained in the cabin until her death in 1904 and was so beloved by the people of Yarmouth Port that a collection was taken up to give her a proper gravestone in Woodside Cemetery. Below is Forten’s indenture contract, reproduced in the Yarmouth Register, and his granddaughter’s gravestone purchased by the village.

And speaking of gravestones, did you know there was once a small cemetery on the south side of the pond? Captain John Eldridge owned land on the southwest corner and built a small cemetery for his family. Near it was a small clearing called Beech Grove, where the local school children traditionally celebrated May Day with a picnic and other festivities. The cemetery was used by the Eldridges and the Shove family, who also had land there, until the 1920s when the decision was made to move those interred there to Woodside Cemetery, originally a Sears family burial ground. A few hikers have reported stumbling upon an old brick crypt in the woods, now empty, but intriguing.

On the north side of the pond much of the land was owned by the Simpkins family. Ruth Sears Simpkins decided to build herself a villa there in the 1870s and reports of its progress were covered by the Yarmouth Register for the fascinated locals. This beautiful home, now hidden by trees, remained in the Simpkins family until 2017. Ruth’s youngest daughter, Mabel Agassiz, who was a generous supporter of schools and local children’s charities, gave the small beach and a bath house to the town for the use of Yarmouth’s children. We have her to thank for those fond childhood memories.

Ruth Simpkins’s villa, called Sandyside, late 1800s. You can see where the photo of the pond was taken from the upper deck.

For a somewhat small body of water at about 50 acres, Dennis Pond was productive in a number of ways, beyond watering livestock. During the 1800s and early 1900s before refrigeration, ice was harvested in winter in two locations. On the south side of the pond stood an ice house owned by the Usher family. Large blocks of ice were cut and stored between layers of sawdust and sold out of a cart in the warmer months. The Simpkins family had a small ice house for their own use on the north side. Water from the pond was used to irrigate cranberry bogs south and east of the pond, owned at one time by the town doctor, Thomas B. Pulsifer and later by George Otis. According to Yarmouth Port’s Samuel Thacher, a Rhode Island man named Vernon Chase spent many a summer in the 1930s camped in a tent by the pond where he picked berries and shot frogs for their legs and sold these items to local restaurants, claiming the $200-$300 he made was enough to see him through the winter in Cranston. Around this time the pond was stocked with smallmouth bass and yellow perch by the state for local anglers.

Thankfully over the years, through Land Bank purchases and Community Preservation funds, the lands around Dennis Pond have been preserved for open space and now look nearly as pristine as they did before the colonists arrived. We can almost imagine what it might have looked like to the indigenous peoples who camped and hunted in those peaceful surroundings.

Researched and written by Nancy Mumford