Diana's Pool

From Peter Marteka's article,

"According to local lore, Diana's Pool was named after a woman — her heart broken by her lover — who jumped to her death from a high cliff into the Natchaug River.  There's also a legend that notes she slipped on all the tears she cried. And a totally different legend notes the area was named after the Diana family, who once owned the pool and ran a concession stand for visitors in the 1800s."

This stretch of the Natchaug has a rich manufacturing history. The Windham County Map of 1833 marks this area with a sawmill, which may have been the old Howard saw and grist mill mentioned in the 1889 history of the county.

Just north of the pool are huge stone blocks lining the north side of the river and off among the trees are old foundations.  These ruins are the Natchaug Paper Co., a paper mill started by Peter Lyon Esq. who purchased the land in 1835.  By 1837 the mill already had a, "4 run of engines, where they manufacture paper, principally for the New York market, to the amount of $65,000 annually." The 1856 map doesn't mention a paper mill yet, but the Chaplin Town Map of 1868 does.  Lyon died in 1863 so on the 1868 map the house across the road is labeled Mrs. Lyon, as his widow was still living there while the business continued. The History of Windham County says that the mill was purchased from Lyon by a Mr. John Page, later a John Dickey, and then Green & Bathwick until the mills burnt down.

The Case brothers of Manchester invested in both the paper mill and the old Howard mill rebuilding them. The book doesn't give dates and isn't clearly written, but it seems the mills were able to get 100 horse power from river and produce around a 1,000 tons of paper per year.

After this there is a gap in the records for almost a hundred years that I would love to fill in. Please send me an email if you have any details from the first half of the 1900s.  The state purchased the property likely sometime between 1970 and 1983 based on USGS topographic maps of the area (Spring Hill Quadrangle).

The bridge over the Natchaug River just downstream from the main pool was built in 1926 and is an example of the state's interest in ornamental concrete in the early 1900s.

In 2001, the Town of Chaplin received an Open Space Grant from the state to purchase the 43-acre Garrison Estate Open Space north of Diana's Pool for $42,500.  Then in 2012 the town received funds from the George Dudley Seymour Trust to purchase the 18.42 acre Fornal property for $46,000.