Chatham Township Kids Ice Skated Everywhere

Contributed by Pat Wells, Chatham Historical Society

Ice skating was a favored pastime in decades past. Local ponds provided the perfect setting for a social afternoon of sport and play. The skates seen here are in the Red Brick Schoolhouse Museum. They belonged to the Knapp Brothers who lived at 154 Southern Boulevard. The big family lived in the white farmhouse that still stands in front of the Chatham- Summit Friends Meeting House. Oscar, Rudolph, Fred, and Carl could have skated on the Diefenthaler's Pond at what is now 331 Lafayette or Spring Lake near the end of Pine Street. (It’s actually a pond.) For a bigger surface, they would have walked up Southern Boulevard to Noe Pond. In 1928, the residents of the Chatham Colony dug out a pool from a patch of swamp ground at the corner

Knapp Brothers' Skates (Courtesy of Chatham Township Historical Society)

of Spring Street and School Avenue. In winter it became Colony Skating Club. Bert Abbazia, who was born and raised in the Chatham Colony, recalls skating on “miles of low wetlands between Chatham Borough and Florham Park.” It was called the freshet, and resulted from the right combination of heavy rains and freezing temperatures.

At the other end of town, at the southern end of Fairmount, the skating rink was the pond on the Fountain property, now known as the historic Johnson House, next to Esternay Field.

Skaters at Fountain House Pond c. 1935 (Courtesy of Chatham Township Historical Society)

Up near Hickory Tree, Sunset Lake made for good skating. Green Village children had several options. A pond behind DeMott's basket factory, where the firehouse now stands, was pretty convenient. Silver Lake was a hike out of town and into Harding at the end of Dickson's Mill Road, but it was big. In her oral history for the Chatham Township Historical Society, Freda Kleider talked of skating through the bogs and swamps when it was so cold that the Great Swamp froze over, making a skating rink of many square miles.

In the late 1950s Archie and Emma Stiles started their ice skate exchange in Archie’s Resale Shop out in Meyersville. You could trade in your outgrown skates for a bigger pair for just $1. Kids loved visiting his magical sheds that held every kind of toy imaginable. Archie’s closed in the late 1990s when Archie was in his late 80s. The sheds, toys and skates are gone now.

Today it’s hard to find a place to ice skate; but, in the old days, if it was frozen kids skated on it.