By Mike Davis

BN Columnist

Howdy neighbor!

Just last week when speaking with good friend of mine Bill Preis, who lives down the shore of Highland Lake at Merryfield Cove beneath Dodge’s Hill, he asked if I knew just when the name of Highland Lake was changed from what it used to be, to what it is now. I realized that while I’ve been gathering data on it for some time, I didn’t have an answer off the top of my head beyond a vague “1870s.”

So, this past week, I sat down to correlate some data, and now at last I feel prepared to tell the story of just when and why this change happened. Because if you don’t know, what we now call Highland Lake has an older name, a more descriptive name, a more outrageous name to some; dear old Crotched Pond.

It all started, of course, in the 18th century. On the earliest survey of Bridgton, being the perimeter line run in late 1765 by Moody Bridges and Col. Joseph Frye, very few geographic features inside our grant are identified, but Crotched Pond is — and in fact, it is wildly exaggerated in shape and misplaced within our borders. One gets the feeling that the team, which stuck only to establishing a rectangular perimeter roughly seven miles square, knew vaguely that there was a large pond with a crotch or “Y” formation at the head of it, lying somewhere inside the territory they marked out, so they just drew one on the map and called it a day. Possibly, one of the surveyors had gone hunting within our wilderness and knew it by reputation or instead had heard it from someone else who had. However it happened, this first survey map, the original of which is in Massachusetts, does establish that “Crotched Pond” is indeed the very earliest, oldest name for this lake, bestowed by the very first survey team and likely in use by men from Fryeburg even before the granting of Bridgton.

Just a year later, when Solomon Wood came up in autumn of ’66 to survey the interior of the grant, he found Crotched Pond and called it by name and mapped it accurately on the survey he returned to the Proprietors in Massachusetts. A later copy of this map, likely from the 1780s, displays the shape we generally recognize, and later maps from the 1790s, including our Incorporation map of 1795, define its boundaries very well.

The eponymous crotch is of course what we now call Knowles Point, which still divides the lake into a Y shape today; though admittedly in the days of the first survey this was more noticeable, as Highland Lake’s water level has been raised some few feet in the intervening decades. Of course, on all the old maps, the name is Crotched Pond, including in our 1871 County Atlas. This name is one of the true, authentic expressions of our early settler’s frontier practicality; the pond has a crotch, so call it that. The same with Long Pond; it’s 12 miles long and not even a mile wide, wow, that’s a long pond. Call it that. So, the locals did, and I hear of no discontent or reservations as to this name by Bridgton residents in all this period. Later, after the first real bout of tourism opened us to the outside world in the years before the Civil War, this began to change. As early as 1859, I find rumbles of displeasure over the name among visiting tourists. Apparently, in early November of ’59 the New Hampshire Patriot ran just such a criticism, a portion of which was later quoted in the New Hampshire Statesman of Nov. 5, 1859: “Your ancestors must have been men of refined taste, (said a traveler when in Bridgton, Me.,) to give names to places here that are too indecent to be mentioned in a company of gentlemen and ladies.”

In agreement was the venerable Sewall C. Strout, who once practiced law here before later becoming a Judge in Portland, afterwards of the Maine Supreme Court. In 1888, he recalled his early days in Bridgton before the Civil War, stating that when he first came to town he found our picturesque pond: “A perfect gem upon the face of nature, although it bore the repulsive name of Crotched Pond.”

Furthermore, in June of 1863, in the Bridgton Reporter no less, I find an unsigned Letter to the Editor proposing “the beautiful sheet of water vulgarly called Crotched Pond” might better be changed in name to “Pondicherry Lake,” a title which the writer, doubtless from away, mistakes in identifying as an “original Indian name.” It isn’t (that’s a story for another time), but it will suffice to show that by the Civil War, at least some folks here were proposing alternatives, under the theory that “it is the least a parent can do for a child, to give him a good name.”

Thus, progressed a slow movement of summer discontent, which eventually culminated in the changing of Crotched Pond, in all its descriptive, pungent, old-time glory, to the much more polite, refined, and utterly impersonal name, Highland Lake. But why? How did locals let this happen? Well, I regret to say, it seems to do with tourism, which to say money, in making our region more appealing to summer-folk. I regret to say that I’ve not found who first suggested Highland, but I’d bet it has something to do with the trend which started in the 1870s, by which our whole region attempted to rebrand itself as “the Highlands of New England,” the most favorable vacation destination for rusticators of all types. But as to exactly when it happened, I can do better; in looking through the archives of The Bridgton News I find the last usage of “Crotched Pond” in a regular descriptive sense, excepting as quoted in property records, appears in the issue of Jan. 31, 1873. Just so, the first reference I can find of the name “Highland Lake” occurs seven months later, in The News of Aug. 29, 1873. This would seem to indicate 1873 as our year, and looking at broader files of the Portland, Lewiston, and Augusta newspapers for this period, this trend holds true.

But I can narrow the window appreciably, for the Portland Daily Press of July 8, 1873, notes, in an account of a visitor’s trip to Bridgton, “This is one of the oldest villages in Cumberland Country and is the trading center of a large tract of country. To the left of it lies the beautiful lake which they abuse by calling it ‘Crotched Pond.’”

Taking these together, it would seem that by 1873, the simmering debate over the name had reached its apex, and that summer the change was made. It is still Crotched Pond at the start of July, but Highland Lake by the end of August. The following year the new name seems entrenched, as that year our local Knights of Pythias Chapter organizes as “Highland Lodge.” By 1875, Highland Lake is overwhelming used in print sources.

That said, there were still hold outs; as late as 1905 Major Shorey here at The News still called for a reversion to the original name, and likely its use in the oral folk-tradition continued for some time after 1873 among old-timers. Most notable among these is the Hon. Nathaniel S. Littlefield, Esq. who once owned much of the shoreland at the foot of the pond including Bill’s Merryfield Cove, and who’d been engaged to argue many lawsuits over lakeside property in the early 1800s.

In a case argued in Portland in 1880, concerning mill privileges along Stevens Brook, it was noted by The News of April 23, 1880 that “Hon. N.S. Littlefield is terribly averse to any deviation from the old-fashioned ways of the fathers, and especially to any change in the name of any of the various localities hereabout, some of which many think may be improved. In the Goodwin suit at Portland, the beautiful lake which supplies the water for running the machinery of our mills is spoken of as ‘Crotched Pond,’ despite the fact that everybody else has agreed to the more attractive name of Highland Lake. The Squire has great reverence for antiquated ways and names…”

In a piece right after my own heart, we find this sentiment echoed by the editors of the Portland Daily Press the following day, who quote the News’ remark and add; “Mr. Littlefield shows both sound judgement and good taste. ‘Crotched Pond’ has a smack of the soil and a meaning to those who gave the name. ‘Highland Lake’ has neither.”

Sadly, I must agree. By now most readers of this column will have noticed that I am a great lover of tradition and local color, and necessarily I find the watering down of this, especially when done to gain broader appeal among outsiders, is a thing I cannot look upon with anything but condemnation and disdain. Were this change to be but newly proposed, I’d be quite dead-set against it — as it is, being itself 150 years old, I suppose I must live with it — but like Squire Littlefield, I can’t be happy for it.

(By the by, I can’t believe I’m agreeing with old Nat on anything, but they do say politics make strange bedfellows!)

More than this, it is further to be regretted just how common this practice was and still is, for renaming things; wherever it does, real history and color are lost in favor of a bland, sterilized, and arguably false impression. Waterford’s Tom Pond, named for a pioneer settler of much repute, was changed in this same era to the far more romantic, Indian sounding name “Keoka Lake” to better appeal to tourists — never minding there never was a Keoka, nor is that even a Maine Native American name at all. So too Anonymous Pond in Harrison, which may have its roots in a real Native American name corrupted by the first settlers, lost its unique Anonymity to become the vague, bland “Crystal Lake,” while over in Casco, the picturesque danger of Rattlesnake Pond was thrown out wholesale, replaced by “Crescent Lake,” for the admitted reason that no tourist would ever come to stay on a pond that might have rattlesnakes. Which, once upon a time, it actually did. And nor has this mindset been relegated to the dustbin of history; why just a few years ago, the state government continued in what has become a well-established practice this century, of changing the names of certain ponds and mountains possessing original names now deemed unacceptable in polite company. Are their moralizing complaints, really that much different from those of the outraged tourists of 1859?

All this is to say that looking back, I do shed a tear for the loss of Crotched Pond, and to all the summer folk who I take to walk beside it and revel in its beauties year on year, I never shy away from using that older, disagreeable name in telling its history. Do you know what? I find it makes them laugh, mostly. They don’t seem offended at all. For it is charming in its way, and this is only right because, let’s face it, such crudities are part of our local story here; a right-proper bit of that Downeast practical humor which we’re in dear short supply of nowadays.

As was said to me just a few weeks ago by a good friend out in Harrison, who knows whereof he speaks, and from long experience; “The kind of humor there was here just fifty years ago, the kind of person and the ways they had of expressing themselves, it’s a thing almost entirely gone today. It makes you sad to see it. Maine was all its own, neighbors still hung Maybaskets on my door in the 70s! All the old-timers, down at the corner store, they had stories you’d not believe, and the words they used, how they said it… we’ve lost all that. I’ve not heard a real Maine accent in so long. All these new folks coming up, well it changes things. It’s not always bad, but… it is sad. To lose what made us feel unique. That’s why we’ve got to preserve as much of this as we can.”

I delight in sharing the old ways; our customs, our traditions and culture, our unique words and expressions, and I would say to all who come to live here, to join with us, that you please do take the care to invest yourself in our local history. Because that’s the beauty of calling somewhere home; if you’re going to live here, it’s yours too. Take it up, make it yours, love it for what it is and celebrate the bonds that it will craft for you, with your new neighbors. After all, there’s still nowhere else like Maine.

Till next time!