Winning Pond
Winning Pond is a pond of about twenty acres in West Billerica, on the southeast side of Treble Cove Road about half a mile west of the Concord River. Its outlet brook runs east through low meadow to the river. The pond is natural: it is on the Commonwealth's list of great ponds, and Samuel Whiting's town plan of 1794 already shows it as "Winnings Pond," "80 rods length, 40 width, 20 Acres." A low dam at the outlet now holds the water a few feet higher. The National Inventory of Dams lists the Winning Pond Dam as a rockfill dam 7 feet high and 150 feet long, owned by the town, with a completion date of 1920, and the federal place-names index classes the pond as a reservoir for that reason.
The pond first appears without a name. When the common lands west of the Concord were divided in 1708, the third range of lots ran from the Treble Cove toward the river, and its last lot, 74 acres granted to Lieutenant John Wilson, lay "between the road, the river, and the pond." The road was the old Treble Cove road from the Fordway toward Concord, which Henry A. Hazen described as running "northwest of Winning's Pond." A division of meadow in December 1663 included two lots "on the Pond Brook," listed between the Concord River lots and Patch meadow, which may be the brook from this pond. No other early name for the pond has been found.
The pond takes its name from the Winning family. Alexander Winning is on the Billerica tax list in 1738, and on June 17, 1748 he was admitted to the church on a certificate that he had belonged to a Presbyterian church in Ireland. He married Deborah Winning (Deborah Parker) on January 12, 1748 and, in Hazen's words, "settled near the fine pond which bears his name, and had a mill on the brook running from it." His son Captain John Winning bought pew 1 on the lower floor of the new meeting house at the sale of December 8, 1797 and died on November 4, 1822. John's son David Parker Winning, born April 1, 1797, was a farmer on Treble Cove Road, and Walling's map of 1853 shows "Wid. R. Winning's Tavern" south of the pond, with the pond itself labeled "Winining's Pond." Hazen wrote in 1883 that "for many years the Winnings maintained a saw-mill on the brook running from Winning's Pond," and he called it "the beautiful Winning's Pond," flanked by highlands toward the river that were early known as Farley Hill. Deeds into the twentieth century bound land on Treble Cove Road on "the heirs of David P. Winning," and Julia Winning still held land on Treble Cove Road in 1913.
The farm on the ridge northeast of the pond took the family name too. By 1879 it was owned by John Mason Bailey, who called it "Winning Farm." Bailey broke ground for a silo there on July 17, 1879, and in 1880 he published at Billerica The Book of Ensilage, describing his "Experience with Ensilage at Winning Farm." The farmhouse still stands (see Winning Farm). In the town's highway reports the road along the pond needed constant work: the surveyor reported in 1899 that he had "filled in near Winning Pond," and the reports of 1902 and 1903 list graveling "near Winnings Pond." A town meeting article of 1921 and 1922 to extend street lighting "from the Railroad Crossing on River Street to the Winning Farm on Treble Cove Road" was referred to the selectmen. The pond was also a place for outings: in December 1928 the school paper reported a junior class roast "at Mitchell's Camp, near Winning Pond in West Billerica."
In 1929 Middlesex County took the Winning Farm, by then a dairy farm of about 300 acres, by eminent domain for a new county jail, and the House of Correction opened there in 1931. For the next sixty years the land east of the pond belonged to the county. At the annual town meeting, on April 30, 1974, an article for a reservoir in the Dolly Brook watershed was referred instead to a committee of the Planning Board, Appeals Board, Water Committee, Conservation Commission, Recreation Committee, Board of Health, selectmen and two members at large, to study "acquiring from the Middlesex County Commissioners the land they have declared surplus in the area adjoining Winning Pond for the purpose of building a reservoir and for recreational purpose." In 1975 the staff of the Northern Middlesex Area Commission helped the selectmen on the "acquisition of the Winning Pond area for town recreational purposes." Chapter 486 of the Acts of 1979 set aside the county land on the easterly side of Treble Cove Road to be used and maintained as a park and recreation area, and by 1981 the town's park department was caring for "the new Veterans Memorial Park located on Treble Cove Road."
On May 4, 1993 a special town meeting voted to ask the legislature to transfer the 194 acres from the county to the town, "to continue to be used as park and recreation area in perpetuity." At the fall town meeting on November 3, 1994, Thomas H. Conway Jr., chairman of the town's County Land Use Committee, presented the county's quitclaim deed to the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, who accepted it for the town. The land became Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park, about 200 acres with "extensive frontage on the Concord River, shoreline on the east side of Winning Pond, a stream, beaver pond," playing fields, trails and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. An Eagle Scout candidate built an information kiosk near the pond in 2004. Working with the state Division of Boating and Fishing Access, the Recreation Department installed two fishing platforms accessible to the handicapped and a canoe launch on the east shore, which were finished in 2009, and fencing was put up along the roadway near the pond in 2013. The town owns the dam, and the pond is used today for fishing, canoeing and walking in the park.