Furnace Pond Beach

🏊Swimming at Furnace Pond Beach

Swimming is permitted at this town beach on freshwater Furnace Pond; town bylaws specifically regulate bathing and swimming here (proper swimwear required, no swimming after 10 PM), and the water is monitored through the swim season for E. coli levels, consistent with a maintained, actively used swimming beach. However, unlike Pembroke's Town Landing (which runs official swimming lessons), the North and South Rivers Watershed Association's site listing states Furnace Pond Beach itself has no lifeguard on duty, so the general town bylaw language that swimming is 'at your own risk when no lifeguard is present' applies here in practice. Visitors are advised to check the state's water-quality dashboard before swimming. The pond has historically been a swimming destination, having hosted bathing beaches and a Finnish bath house in the early 20th century before its shoreline was residentially developed.

📍How to get to this swimming hole

Furnace Pond Beach is located along Furnace Colony Drive in Pembroke, MA (approx. 42.0503, -70.8223), a residential street off the pond's western shore. Nearby landmarks include Oakland Square (~1.0 mi), Camp Kiwanis (~1.1 mi), Golden Ring Camp (~1.1 mi), and Oldham Village (~1.3 mi). No official turn-by-turn driving route (e.g., specific highway exit) was found in available sources; visitors should navigate to the Furnace Colony Drive address via GPS.

Parking: Limited free on-site parking is available along Furnace Colony Drive (per NSRWA). Town bylaw (Rule 16) additionally states parking within the beach area for boat trailers is reserved for cars with resident stickers, while limited parking for non-residents/transients is provided outside the beach area; a separate note in the rules clarifies that beach stickers are no longer actually required to use the beach itself.

🥾The walk in

No real hike here. The water is a short walk from where you park. This is a drive-up/walk-up town beach on Furnace Colony Drive with roadside parking directly adjacent to the beach access; no hike or trail is involved in reaching the swimming area.

📜Backstory

Furnace Pond was originally known as Herring Pond, after herring runs so prized that Pembroke began regulating their taking as early as 1741. It was later renamed for one of Plymouth Colony's earliest blast furnaces, built nearby around 1702 and operated by Lambert Despard, where some of the first cannons cast in the United States were reportedly made. The pond's shores were the site of the Native American settlement Namassakeesett ('Place of Much Fish') and the lodge of Chief Wampatuck, an area later called Sachem's Point; the Wampanoag sachem's granddaughter, Queen Patience, later held significant acreage nearby. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like Pembroke's other ponds, Furnace Pond became a summer vacation draw for city residents, developing children's camps, bathing beaches, and a Finnish bath house, along with dense cottage colonies along its shores, before the shoreline transitioned to year-round residential development. Today the pond also serves as a secondary water supply for the City of Brockton, and a fish ladder connects it to neighboring Oldham Pond for alewife spawning runs.