Where is Silver Lake?
“Nonantum”, Algonkian for “the place of rejoicing”, was what the first band of “Praying Indians” converted to Christianity by the Reverend John Eliot chose to call their village in the vicinity of the Chestnut Hill Golf course. Though the settlement was there for less than half a dozen years, the name persisted, and became attached, at various times, to what is now Farlow Hill, to an early commercial block on Washington Street in Newton Corner, and to a textile manufacturing concern. The Nonantum Worsted Company bought the Dalby Mills on Chapel Street in the late 1860s and for the subsequent two decades, provided employment for almost six hundred residents of the “North Village”. Small wonder the neighborhood became known as “Nonantum”. At the heart of Nonantum lay Silver Lake. Two descriptions from the 1880s attest to its charm, mention the absence of a “visible outlet” and comment on the cutting of ice. More recently, local residents have remembered skating in winter and at least one
