Beaver Pond

Beaver Pond is the name used here for the beaver pond in Vietnam Veterans Park in West Billerica, a pond of a few acres on the outlet brook of Winning Pond, just east of the pond and southeast of Treble Cove Road. The brook leaves Winning Pond over the town's dam, spreads into this pond behind beaver dams, and runs on east through low meadow to the Concord River. No pond called Beaver Pond appears in any Billerica record, deed or map found; the name only describes it. The town's reports from 1998 on list among the park's features "shoreline on the east side of Winning Pond, a stream, beaver pond."

The land was the last lot of the third range in the division of 1708, the 74 acres granted to Lieutenant John Wilson "between the road, the river, and the pond," and the brook through it is the one on which, Henry A. Hazen wrote, "the Winnings maintained a saw-mill" for many years. In the twentieth century it was part of the Winning Farm, which Middlesex County took for its new House of Correction in 1929 and 1930. The state's survey of the jail records that the county found on the farm a cranberry bog of 16 acres "which yielded 1000 bushels annually," worked as part of the jail's dairy farm across the road from the prison, and the beaver pond appears to cover the site of that bog. The land became a county park under Chapter 486 of the Acts of 1979 and passed to the town in 1994 as Vietnam Veterans Park, and its trails now run near the pond.

References

1. Annual Report 1998: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park features, shoreline on the east side of Winning Pond, a stream, beaver pond
2. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): 1708 lot list, the last lot between the road, the river, and the pond
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883): the Winnings maintained a saw-mill on the brook running from Winnings Pond