The pictures above, except for the one with the caption that mentions the Milford Ice Company dam, were taken from Draper Corporation photography department negatives at the Bancroft Library.
Note the white town line on the GoogleEarth view above. Milford is above and to the right of the line, Upton on the left and Hopedale is below the line. Route 140 runs across the view from right to left, more or less in the middle. This has often seemed to me like a strange change in the town line which up to that point is fairly straight in its division of Hopedale and Milford. My guess is that when the town line was drawn during the 1886 separation of Hopedale from Milford, the Hopedale people, or the Draper people (well, same thing) wanted the Mill Pond, all or at least half, to be part of Hopedale because of their interest in water rights. Draper Company owned the water rights to North Pond, which is upstream from the pond By 1886, they were getting beyond the point where water power was a factor, but perhaps there was still some use for it. Another possibility is brought up by the caption on the picture at the top of the page. Had the Hopedale Coal & Ice Company bought the Milford Ice Company and saw some advantage to having the pond become part of Hopedale? We’ll probably never know, but if I can find anything on it, I’ll add it here.
That strange little chunk of Hopedale that juts up north of Route 140 and through the pond is the reason that when traveling from Hopedale toward Upton, you pass an Entering Hopedale sign, and then within a couple of hundred yards or so, you see that you are Entering Upton. Traveling the other way, it’s Entering Hopedale and then very soon, Entering Milford.
Arnold Nealley refers to the pond as Taylor’s Marsh. The Lee Taylor family used to live in a house on the west side of the pond. Taylor worked for Hopedale Coal & Ice, which seems a hint that H C & I had an interest in the area. It makes me think that they may have owned the house and much of the land in the area, and that Taylor probably rented the house from the company.
In the Milford Ice Company ad near the top of the page, they give their address as 101 West Street. The address for the house right next to the pond is 363 West Street. I can see a couple of possibilities to explain this. 363 West Street is a Hopedale address. 101 West Street is a Milford address. Also, even the Hopedale address might have had a different number in 1911 when the book the ad was in was printed. In that book, many of the addresses have numbers very different than the same places do now.
In the picture below, you can see the town boundary stone in the middle of the Mill River, where it runs under Route 140.
During the middle of January 2015, I passed by the pond several times, and each time I wondered why it was so low, and who controlled the level of the dam. I stopped for the pictures you see below on January 22, (and again on January 23) and then came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a matter of lowering the boards, but that they were all gone. You can compare the pictures below that show the dam with several of those above. The dam, at least the part that was holding back the water, is gone.
Eventually the dam was replaced, as shown below.
.