Anyone driving to Salem from New London will probably pass Horse Pond, a 13-acre lake mostly surrounded by state forest. Once called Mountain Lake and Beckwith Pond, the body of water is the focus of several horse-related legends and incidents, one of which led to its current name.

The oldest story of Horse Pond is a Native American legend that was first published in the “Gleaner of the Vale,” the school paper for Music Vale Seminary, according to an article in the March 28, 1949, issue of The Day. While the ethnicity of the young man in the story vary between versions, the legend says the daughter of a local chief and her secret lover rode the horse they were riding off a cliff into the pond to avoid being caught together. The cliff was then known as Lovers Leap, and a 1969 report from the Salem Historical Society said that on moonlit nights, the pond shimmers like the mane of the white horse the couple rode to their deaths.

Horse Pond got its name from an unsolved crime from around 1800, when the main “Governor’s Road” from Hartford to New London passed by the west side of the pond. According to the account in The Day, a rich peddler stopped at a house on the south end of the pond to get his horse’s saddle fixed. He was pleased with the repairs and paid the leather worker well, but both men disappeared after the exchange of money, and the peddler’s horse was found floating in the pond a few days later. No bodies or additional evidence were found, even after the local officials sought the diving services of a crew of Polynesian men working on a whaling ship in New London. The pond had been renamed Mountain Lake around 1855, but Horse Pond was the name that stayed with the residents.

The Governor’s Road, which would become Route 85, was eventually relocated from the west side of Horse Pond to the east, and a project to fill in some of the pond to straighten the road started in 1949. Today, Horse Pond is used as a fishing spot and a water source for firetrucks.

a.hutchinson@theday.com