Ell Pond drownings

Content Warning: this post may prove disturbing for those with aquaphobia.

In our last post we remembered how Ell Pond was once a popular water recreation spot. Yet there was a dark side to that story. Between 1867 and 1950, at least 27 people drowned in Ell Pond.

Four of these drownings were suicides. The rest were accidents, and the vast majority took place during the summer months. Every accidental drowning was a boy or young man between the ages of 3 and 25. This fact speaks both to the male dominance of swimming during the first part of the twentieth century, and also to a masculine ideal that called for reckless, daring behavior. Girls and young women do feature in Ell Pond rescue stories, but they all managed to survive.

Sometimes the victim died alone, the body only later discovered by a passerby or swimmer. Such was the case in 1917, when Harry Brock “stumbled over” the body of 11-year-old Roy Hamilton as he waded into the water.

More frequently, friends and family were left with the visceral horror of watching their loved ones sink beneath the surface, as when in 1928 Joseph Crane watched his 19-year-old son and namesake drown just thirty feet offshore, owing to the sudden onset of a heart attack.

Drownings most frequently occurred on account of boats, either because their occupants got out to swim and then found themselves unable to get back in, or from capsizing, as for example when 22-year-old Fred Sackett’s canoe overturned in 1904, and he could not stave off the onset of cramps.

For every drowning, there were many more heroic stories of rescues. In 1907, 9-year-old Gertrude Leisk went fishing at the corner of the pond where the gazebo now stands. She fell in and bumped her head on the bottom, but Rose Levine, also age 9, heard her muffled screams and pulled her to shore. In 1949, a man vaulted a fence, swam out, dove to the bottom of the pond, and rescued James Daley, age 23, from almost certain death—and he left before anyone could get his name.

The pollution that now chokes Ell Pond has been an environmental disaster. But with the pond in such an unappealing state, at least the drownings have come to an end.