Stiles Pond Beach

🏊Swimming at Stiles Pond Beach

The town beach on Stiles Pond's southwestern shore features sandy beach frontage with docks and floats. Free use of watercraft is offered to members, and certified Red Cross instructors run swimming lessons during the summer season. Lifeguards are on duty during posted hours, though town survey data indicates many residents also swim outside lifeguard hours.

📍How to get to this swimming hole

The beach (Kevin Koster Park) is located on the southwestern shore of Stiles Pond just off Main Street in Boxford, roughly three miles west of the town center. A separate public boat ramp providing general pond access is also located at the pond's southwestern end off Main Street.

Parking: Seasonal parking stickers are issued with paid beach memberships (family memberships include two stickers, individual memberships include one); parking at the beach itself appears restricted to members with stickers. A separate town-managed public boat ramp on the southwestern end of the pond off Main Street has its own small parking area (reported capacity of roughly 6-8 cars).

🥾The walk in

No real hike here. The water is a short walk from where you park. This is a drive-up Town of Boxford beach (Kevin Koster Park) with its own parking lot directly off Main Street; no trail or hike is needed to reach the water.

📜Backstory

Stiles Pond was enlarged from a smaller headwater pool of Fish Brook to its current 60-acre size in 1878, when the Diamond Match Company built a dam at the outlet to store water for a mill wheel on Lawrence Road; the dam has been rebuilt multiple times, most recently in 1994 (notably without restoring a low-water release pipe, which some believe has harmed downstream cold-water fish habitat in Fish Brook). The town beach was renamed Kevin Koster Park in 2006 in honor of a longtime Boxford resident and former lifeguard. For decades the beach was run by volunteers from the Boxford Athletic Association; starting in the 2025 season, management shifted to the Town's Recreation Committee with a newly created paid Beach Director role, a partnership the Town continued in a scaled-down form for 2026. The pond has also long been home to several youth camps, including Camp Rotary (operating since 1921) and the Danvers YMCA's Stiles Pond Day Camp.