page_title: Spy Pond
section_title: Cultural history
hierarchical_section_title: Spy Pond / History / Cultural history
caption_attribution_description: English: Current condition of Spy Pond
context_page_description: Spy Pond, also known as Spie Pond in the 17th & 18th centuries, is a 103-acre kettle hole pond located near the heart of Arlington, Massachusetts, adjacent to the Minuteman Bikeway.
context_section_description: On April 19, 1775, Mother Batherick, an elderly woman who liked to gather dandelions by Spy Pond, managed to corral and take prisoner six Revolutionary War Redcoats who were fleeing their captured supply train.
  In 1850, the Spy Pond Water Company began piping water to West Cambridge. The Spy Pond Water Company changed its name to the Arlington Lake Company when West Cambridge was renamed Arlington in 1867.
  During the Civil War the Union Army conducted training at Camp Sheppard near Spy Pond and following the war civilian rifle matches were conducted by the Massachusetts Rifle Association from 1875 through 1876 before their move to Woburn, Massachusetts.
  The 19th century also saw Spy Pond become an industrial center as entrepreneurs sought to harvest the benefits of this natural resource for export. Spy Pond became a source for ice in the winter, cut into huge blocks for shipping, and pure water for nearby Boston in the summer. Businesses shipped Spy Pond ice as far away as India, installing huge amounts of infrastructure and equipment in the Arlington area in the process.  This led to the development of the local railroad and large-scale manufacture of ice tools.
  In the 1970s, the Wetland Protection Act was passed classifying Spy Pond as a great pond under Massachusetts law. Despite this classification, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts uses Spy Pond for drainage from Route 2, resulting in what Cori Beckwith, administrator of the Arlington Conservation Commission, describes as a "slightly hazardous" sandbar and states that "its  [sic] costly" to remove.
caption: Spy Pond sandbar
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