Lake St. Catherine History

Today, no one has to explain which lake they mean when they say Lake St. Catherine. The name is familiar to residents, seasonal homeowners and visitors throughout the Wells and Poultney area.

Look back through Vermont's old newspapers, however, and the story becomes much more complicated. The same body of water appears under several names: Wells Pond, Lake Austin, St. Austin, St. Augustine and Lake St. Catherine — sometimes in circulation at the same time.

Lake St. Catherine Appears in Early Records

One of the strongest documentary clues appeared in the October 13, 1882, edition of The Poultney Journal, which reprinted an account from the History of Wells concerning "Lake Austin or St. Austin." The article included part of an 1868 letter from former Vermont governor and historian Hiland Hall. Citing New York land papers, Hall reported that a survey returned on April 24, 1767, described land belonging to Colonel John Maunsell on the west side of "Lake St. Catherine." The same tract was reportedly granted to Maunsell on March 7, 1771 — and Hall referred to a later map on which the lake was marked "St. Cathe.," with Wells to the east and Pawlet to the southeast.

This suggests some version of the name existed in official records before Vermont became a state — but that doesn't mean it was the name most local people used.

Wells Pond and Lake Austin

The 1882 article described the lake as "commonly known as Wells Pond," and noted that elderly residents remembered hearing it called Lake Austin or Lake St. Austin rather than Lake St. Catherine. An earlier 1878 Poultney Journal article recorded that Deacon J. Joslin objected to the St. Catherine name because, in his younger days, the water had been known as Wells Pond, and that people later began calling it Lake Austin after a man who lived along its shore.

The old name stayed rooted for decades. In 1888, a writer remembering life around the lake in 1845 joked that Wells Pond had not yet "put on airs," apologizing for using the older name because he hadn't yet grown accustomed to the lake's newer, more formal one.

The Naming Confusion Reached the Courtroom

By 1887, the lake's many names were more than local nostalgia — they became part of a fishing case reported by the Rutland Daily Herald, in which two men were accused of illegally taking fish from the body of water identified in the newspaper as "Lake Austin or Wells Pond or Lake St. Catherine." The reporter joked that the aquatic geography of Wells was in a "state of deep confusion" — humor that only worked because readers recognized the problem.

St. Augustine and the Jesuit Story

Thompson's Vermont Gazetteer once used the name St. Augustine for the lake, and later newspaper accounts — a 1926 Rutland Daily Herald article most prominently — repeated a tradition that Jesuit missionaries had named the water. It's an evocative story, but no original Jesuit record documenting the naming has surfaced; it's best understood as long-standing tradition rather than proven fact.

Hall himself, writing in 1868, offered a different theory: that "St. Catherine" was a New York surveyor's name that never spread into local use, since Maunsell never settled his land patent. A third theory, from Esther Swift's Vermont Place Names, traces the name to a 1771 New York township patent named for St. Catherine's Point on the Isle of Wight — kept by the Green Mountain Boys even after they expelled New York's settlers. None of the three is proven beyond doubt.

Curious about the full story, court case and all? Read Lake St. Catherine Has Had a Few Names on our Lake Stories blog.