Green Pond, New Jersey

Green Pond
Summer 2006
Green Pond
Location	Morris County, New Jersey
Coordinates	41°00′23″N 74°29′35″W
Basin countries	United States
Surface area	465 acres (1.88 km2)
Max. depth	86 ft (26 m)
Surface elevation	1,040 ft (320 m)

Green Pond is a spring-fed glacial lake (elevation 1,048 feet) that runs along a roughly northeast-southwest axis, bordered on the longer, lateral sides by rocky terrain. On the eastern side is Copperas Mountain (elevation 1,222 feet), and on the west, Green Pond Mountain (elevation 1,240 feet) rises sharply from the lake with a boulder-strewn shoreline. The lake's outflow at the southwestern end is into tributaries of the Rockaway River, which run through the United States Army's Picatinny Arsenal and through an area of legally designated wetlands where development is restricted.

Despite a name suggestive of a small lily pad and algae-coated pool, Green Pond lake is fairly large (approximately 2.5 miles (4.0 km) long and 0.5 miles (0.80 km) in breadth at its widest point - 465 acres (188 ha) total), and the water clarity is high due to the lake's source (underground cold-water springs).

The lake has a number of sand bars and other shoaling features, and the average depth is 13 feet (4.0 m). There are deeper areas also: the maximum depth was measured at 54 feet (16 m) during soundings taken in the 1970s by John Stenz and Doug Charlton. The lake is stocked seasonally with trout and bass; other aquatic species include sunfish, perch, catfish, bluegills, pickerel, and snapping turtles.

The geology of the Green Pond region is peculiar.[3] The lake is situated in the center of the precambrian New York-New Jersey Highlands, a northeast-southwest system of folded and faulted igneous and metamorphic rocks that form numerous ridges and valleys. The "Green Pond Outlier", named for the lake, is a thin belt of Paleozoic sedimentary rocks that bisects the precambrian crystalline rocks and extends for more than 60 miles (97 km) between Interstate 80 in New Jersey and the New York Thruway in New York. In some places, the ground cover is glacial till from the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin glaciation.

From the American Revolutionary War period onwards, the area around Green Pond was a site of extensive mining activity - especially iron mining, which peaked in the 19th century. Currently, there is no active mining in New Jersey. The name "Copperas" (an older term for ferrous sulfate) attests to this history, and the ruins of at least 3 mines are reportedly visible nearby:[4]

• Canfield Mine at the base of Copperas Mountain, where the mined ore was magnetite hosted in Pochuck gneiss.
• Winter Mine, iron in magnetite ore, located east of Green Pond, which opened in 1882 and reopened in the spring of 1885, but closed before 1886. The ore vein was 4 meters wide.
• Pardee Mine, another iron mine in magnetite ore hosted in Poichuck gneiss. Located east of Green Pond at the base of Copperas Mountain, Pardee started about 1870 and closed in 1872, then reopened about 1882 and closed permanently in 1884. This mine reportedly produced 2,500 tons of ore.

Before Dutch settlement of northern New Jersey began in the late 17th century, the region was home to the Lenape Native American tribes. However, despite the 18th- and 19th-century mining activity in nearby areas, the Green Pond lakeshore and immediate environs were sparsely populated by permanent residents until the 20th century. Green Pond village, at the north end of the Lake, was a Methodist church summer camp from the 1920s into the 1940s, and many of the village houses that date to this period remain unheated bungalows of the American Craftsman style that are used primarily during the summertime. However, due to pressure from rising real estate costs in the New York City suburbs, these holiday cottages are gradually giving way to year-round dwellings with central heating. Along the eastern and southern shores of the lake - areas controlled by the Lake End Corporation - almost all of the houses are now inhabited year-round. A few houses are accessible only by boat, most notably the Seven Sisters, an isolated cluster of summer houses on the west side of the lake.

People who were born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Green Pond include:

• Lou Benfatti (born 1971), former defensive tackle for the New York Jets (1994-1996).[5][6]
• Robin Cook (born 1940), a medical doctor and prolific author of "medical thrillers" is most known for his fiction novel, Coma (1977). Cook's other works include Outbreak (1987), Vital Signs (1991), and Toxin (1998).
• John Drury Clark, (1907-1988), rocket fuel developer, chemist, and science fiction writer, and his wife Inga Stephens Pratt Clark (1906-1970), artist and illustrator, resided in the Newfoundland section of Green Pond in their later years.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Green Pond, New Jersey.

• U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Green Pond (lake)
• U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Green Pond (populated place)