Glover isn’t a very big town — at last count its population was just under 1,000. But it does have at least one big claim to fame: Runaway Pond. It could well be the only town in Vermont that managed to flood itself and its neighbors in a drought year and accidentally, but nonetheless permanently, empty a 100-foot-deep lake.
Runaway Pond, which is no longer a pond, lake, or any other kind of body of water, was called Long Pond back in 1810. It was about a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, and on average, 80 to 100 feet deep, about 150 feet deep at its center.
Two hundred years ago, with help from the local miller and about 50 of his friends and customers, it “ran away.” Today, it’s an unremarkable, brushy tract of land, unrecognizable as its former self except for a granite monument at a small rest area that commemorates its long ago existence.
A new book, Run Chamberlain Run! Solving the 200-year-old Mystery of Runaway Pond, by Dennis D. Chamberlain attempts to reconstruct the events of that day, June 6, 1810.
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How does a town LOSE an entire lake? A new book tells the story of Glover’s Runaway Pond
