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A small lake or pond in Rowe on a clear late-fall or early-spring afternoon, the water dark blue and rippled. A wooded ridge of bare hardwoods and dark conifers rises across the far shore under a pale blue sky with thin clouds. In the foreground, a mowed grass lawn slopes down to the water; a single bare deciduous tree stands at right with a wooden bench beside it, and another bench sits closer to the shore at left. A small stand of marsh grass edges the right side of the pond.
Outdoors · Park
Pond in Rowe, Massachusetts, April 2014. Photo by Doug Kerr (Dougtone), source, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Pelham Lake Park

Rowe, Franklin County

Category
Park
Town
Rowe
County
Franklin
Difficulty
Easy

Pelham Lake Park is a roughly 1,360-acre town-owned park at the center of Rowe, in the far northwest corner of Franklin County. The park’s recreation core is Pelham Lake, an 81-acre dam-impounded pond, with a small swimming beach, a picnic area, and the trailheads for a network of woods roads and footpaths that climbs into the wooded uplands on either side of Pond Road. The park is the legacy of a 1955 gift from longtime summer resident Percy W. Brown, and it has been managed by a town park commission ever since.

A residents’ park

This is the unusual part: Pelham Lake Park is restricted to Rowe residents, taxpayers, and their guests. The beach, the picnic area, and the residents’ parking lot off Pond Road are signed accordingly, and the use of the park is policed by a town park ranger. Visitors from other towns can walk in on the trail system from informal pull-offs along Pond Road and ride or hike the trails (these are open public ways through the park’s forest), but the lake itself, the beach, and the developed day-use area are not for general public use. If you are visiting friends in Rowe, ask them to sign you in.

The lake and the dam

Pelham Lake is an impoundment, not a natural pond. The dam was first built to feed an industrial talc mill downstream and was condemned and nearly lost in the 1920s; Percy Brown rebuilt both the Pelham Lake dam and the smaller Mill Pond dam in the village in the late 1920s, and the lake has stood at its current level since. The lake covers about 81 acres of the park. The swimming beach sits at the southwest corner of the lake, off Pond Road.

Trails

The park advertises over twenty miles of trails, threaded through what is mostly second-growth northern hardwood and hemlock forest on the slopes between Pond Road and Davis Mine Road. The terrain is rolling rather than steep: old farm and woods roads, some footpaths cut more recently, and a marked Old Growth Habitat trail through one of the few uncut stands. The trails are popular for hiking, running, and (on the wider woods roads) mountain biking and snowmobiling.

The Davis Mine area on the park’s east side is a former pyrite mine, now a quiet wooded site of long-running interest to mineral collectors and the source of acidic drainage that the town and state have monitored for decades.

What to know

  • Hunting and trapping. Trapping is prohibited throughout the park. Hunting and weapons are prohibited except in designated hunting areas within non-covenant parts of the park during legal hunting seasons. Fishing is allowed.
  • Beach and developed areas. Residents, taxpayers, and signed-in guests only.
  • Trails are open daily dawn to dusk, year-round.
  • Dogs are not permitted at the beach, playground, picnic area, fitness center, dam area, or on beach roads; leashed dogs are allowed on marked trails.
  • Winter. Ice fishing and skating on the lake when conditions allow; trails are used by snowshoers and snowmobilers.

Sources