Rust Pond

First things first: Rust Pond is not named for the color of the water. It is named for Colonel Henry Rust, an early Wolfeboro proprietor who in 1767 drew Lot 15, six hundred acres that included the pond. Around 1773 he built a large house on the north shore and moved up from Portsmouth with his wife Ann; the property stayed in the Rust family for six generations, and the house stood until it burned in 1880.

The pond worked for its living in the 1800s. According to Parker's 1901 history of Wolfeboro, Rust Brook, the pond's little outlet, powered at various times a grist mill, a saw mill, a shingle mill, a chair factory, a pipe factory, and a tannery, a whole industrial career packed into one small stream.

The twentieth century traded mills for camps. Small cottages settled along the wooded shoreline, some still renting to summer families today, and the pond has otherwise kept the lowest profile of any water in Wolfeboro. That is its whole appeal: two hundred acres of clear, quiet water that history mostly left alone.