"Just north of Colebrook’s boundary with Sandisfield, there is a rather large body of water that since the mid-1700s was known as Simons Pond. This received its name because a family by the name of Simons was among the handful of original settlers to that township. The pioneering Simons’ set up housekeeping on a picturesque elevation just east of the sparkling body of water.
The name remained unchanged until the early years of the 20th century, when the McClave family of New Jersey purchased the land surrounding the lake, in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. Shortly after this, a request was made to the Board of Geographic Names, a U. S. government agency charged with formalizing all geographical names in the United States, to change the name to “Lake Marguerite”, after the eldest McClave daughter. This was done, and forever since, some of us refer to the body of water as “Simons Pond” while others more accurately, call it “Lake Marguerite”.
The name change does cause some problems today, however. To begin with, there is a road leading northward from Beech Hill Road in Colebrook that is named “Simons Pond Road”. This road is not passable up to and past the Massachusetts border as it once did. Instead, for all practical purposes at least, it ends just past the junction of Cobb City Road and Simons Pond Road.
To confuse the issue even more, there is a pond visible from this intersection that has no formal name, having been formed by a colony of beavers some years back when E. R. LeManquis owned the site. It is a very easy and logical mistake for someone to look at a map, see the road going northward tangent to a large body of water named “Lake Marguerite”, while at the same time ending (as far as a passable road, at least) at another unnamed body of water. It is easy to assume that this is Simons Pond.
Another problem exists with the name of Colebrook’s highest elevation, Pond Mountain (height 1552 feet), which lies directly south of Lake Marguerite. It received it’s name, of course, when its watery companion was named “Simons Pond”. One other confusing point in this location does not have its roots in the name change, but rather with the fact that Sandisfield calls their end of this road “Beech Hill Road”, right to the state line where it meets Colebrook’s end, which is called “Simons Pond Road”. The improved portion of Simons Pond Road is only about one half mile long and intersects at its southern end with “Beech Hill Road”. The underlying factor is that this entire upland, centered on Beech Hill, a geographical elevation in Colebrook, until quite recently was known as “Beech Hill”, and any resident, regardless of where on this upland he lived, thought of himself as a resident of Beech Hill. Not so today when there are six different named roads on, as the old timers used to say, “The Beech Hill, so called.”
But there really was a Simons Pond in Colebrook, it has been changed to “Phelps Pond”. Its exit waters, Loon Brook, passes under Phelps Road and flows into the marshy meadows north of Colebrook Center at a point west of 645 Colebrook Road."*
{*Information pdf written By Bob Grigg, taken from the website: www.colebrookhistoricalsociety.org}
A quick cache on state land in an area surrounded by foundations and old junk. Be cautious around the foundations, there is a well about 5 ft deep.