This is a mystery cache for which you are solving for coordinates using historical information about the area. All information needed is within the details below. The cache is NOT at the posted coordinates. PLEASE do NOT look for the cache at the posted coordinates as this is a historical EPA SuperFund site. Also, the cache is not necessarily winter-friendly nor is it winter-unfriendly. It certainly will be more difficult in the winter however.
Permission has been granted by the Westborough Recreation Department in association with the Westborough Community Land Trust, advocating for the public usage of publically owned land, in this case the Charm Bracelet Trail.
Relevant Background
The Spirit Watches Still
Long before iron rails carved through these lands, the Algonquian people knew this place by another name. They called the dark waters Hocomonco—named for Hobomok, the fearsome manito (spirit) of death in Wampanoag tradition. The colonists who recorded this name believed Hobomok was an evil spirit, a trickster who brought illness and misfortune. But to the native peoples, he was more complex—a spirit of the underworld who could both harm and heal.
Perhaps Hobomok sensed what was coming.
When the Iron Horse Arrived
In November 1834, the Boston and Worcester Railroad extended its line to this town, bringing progress thundering along the tracks. The railroad needed sturdy wooden ties to hold its rails, and tall poles to carry wires across the land. But untreated wood rots quickly. Enter creosote—a thick, oily preservative derived from coal tar, capable of making wood last decades in the harshest conditions.
From 1928 to 1946, the Montan Treating Company and American Lumber and Treating Company operated a wood treatment facility on the shores of Hocomonco Pond. Here, they saturated telephone poles, railroad ties, pilings, and fence posts with creosote. The very tracks that still carry commuters between Worcester and Boston today once relied on wood treated at this site.
But the process was dirty. Creosote waste, thick with carcinogenic polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), was discharged into an unlined pit. The poison seeped into the soil, the groundwater, and eventually the pond itself. The spirit's waters turned dark.
The Long Cleanup
On September 8, 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency added Hocomonco Pond to the National Priorities List as a Superfund site. For decades, remediation efforts were conducted—bioremediation, soil flushing, and groundwater treatment—to heal the wounded land. In 2019, the groundwater treatment system was finally decommissioned. The spirit's home was clean once more.
A Bridge to the Present
Today, the Charm Bracelet Trail winds past these historic sites, connecting Westborough's open spaces in a 28-mile loop of paths first charted in 2000. The trail crosses over the same commuter rail line that the Boston and Worcester Railroad pioneered nearly two centuries ago—now the MBTA Framingham/Worcester Line, carrying thousands of passengers daily between Worcester and Boston's South Station.
A recently renovated pedestrian bridge marked 2025 spans the tracks, connecting past and present. Stand upon it, and you walk above the same right-of-way that the Iron Horse first traveled in 1834.
THE RIDDLE
Final Coordinates: 42° 16.*** N, 71° 39.*** W
The Spirit speaks in numbers still, Through poison years and railroad's will. Count the seasons from Iron Horse's birth, To when they marked this poisoned earth. Add the month they named the blight, The first three figures come to light.
For the final three, hear Hobomok's call: When did the creosote stop its fall? Take those final digits of that year— Precede with nothing, the path grows clear.
They treated wood so it would last, Yet here lies proof that nothing's past. Where new woods rise, an elder fell— Its broad remains guard secrets well.