Jennifer DiCola Matos, executive director of the Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society, has been leading the community on an “Armchair History Tour” of West Hartford.
Woodridge Lake and Wood Pond in the 1940s. Image from Celebrate West Hartford book
Submitted by Jennifer DiCola Matos
In May 1912, brother and sister William and Lucy Woodruff sold a portion of the 64 acres of land they had inherited from their father George to a businessman named Fred Arnold.
What was Arnold’s business? He was the owner of Trout Brook Ice & Feed which had been established in 1879 by his father Edwin Arnold. Business was good. The company had an ice pond on Trout Brook in town and one in New Hartford. Arnold purchased the land on what was once the Middle Road to Farmington with the express purpose of building an ice pond.
Learn more about Arnold’s endeavors – including how an accidental flooding of Ignatius Kulakowski’s field created a second body of water – and how a West Hartford resident and developer Wallace B. Goodwin transformed the land around an obsolete ice pond into the Wood Pond/Woodridge Lake neighborhood that still thrives today in this episode of the Armchair Tour of West Hartford History!
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