Candlewood Lake
Our family enjoyed going to Candlewood Lake in western Connecticut on summer weekends. It turns out my father had been enjoying the lake since his 20s, as evidenced by the following movie of him goofing around with his buddy David Hungerford, about 1938. David and his wife Janice introduced my parents, and were best man and maid-of-honor at the 1945 Jacobson wedding. (Janice’s mother, Clara Pratt, married my maternal grandfather, Ira Ridgeway Phillips, following the deaths of their spouses.)
Later, when I was in high school, we visited my parents’ church friends at a camp on the lake. I know there are photos of those visits among thousands of our family’s 35mm slides. I’ll post any as I discover them.
Though Candlewood Lake is the largest in Connecticut, it is an artificial lake. All the lake water is pumped up from the Housatonic River (!) and held behind a dam, completed in 1928, and then released to produce electricity. I remember passing the dam and it’s huge penstock on the road to the lake, with the power plant below. After passing through the hydro station the lake water reenters the Housatonic.1
This work by Bruce Jacobson is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 International License—Attribution-ShareAlike.
The header image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. (This file was suggested for transfer by User:Fbot).
The video “Candlewood Lake Outing, c. 1938” is a copy of a reel of 8 mm film from Carl Edwin Raymond Jacobson, presumably shot by him in 1938 (companion reels are labeled “1938 huricanne”). From the Carl E. R. Jacobson Collection, Northeast Historic Film, record 2254.0001-.0008.
Last Updated on 3 May 2024.