Lake Saint Catherine is an 852-acre body of water located in Rutland County, Vermont in the towns of Wells and Poultney. Lake St. Catherine State Park is located along its eastern shore.
Lake St. Catherine State Park
Lake St. Catherine State Park is a 117-acre state park located in Poultney, Vermont, at Lake Saint Catherine. The park is administered by the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation as part of the Vermont state park system.
Lake St. Catherine Information
Lake St. Catherine is a large, long lake of 930 acres which begins at the Lily Pond in Poultney and drains south into Wells. The lake has a maximum depth of 68 feet, an average depth of 32.2 feet, and a volume of 29,945 acre feet. It is about five miles long and drains into a narrow channel which connects it with Little Pond.
Little Pond is a shallow lake of about 181 acres, with an average depth of two feet, a maximum depth of only four feet and a volume of 362 acre feet. No one knows for sure how Lake St. Catherine got its name. To the early settlers the waters were simply Wells Pond or Lake Austin, also a term of uncertain origin but thought to have come from a family by that name at the North End.
Most of the inlets and points around the lake are still known by the name of the one who first settled nearby- Atwater's Bay, Hall's Bay, Cone's Point, etc. Obviously Ox Bow and Horseshoe Bays were so called because of their shape.
The land surrounding the inlet commonly called Forest House Bay is, at present, a popular bathing beach. The dam at the outlet of the lake has been an important factor in the St. Catherine story. Modern scholarship indicates that the entirety of Lake St. Catherine is really a system of three lakes that include Lilly Pond, Lake St. Catherine and Little Lake--interconnected by navigable channels.
In about 1900, the Vermont Fish and Game Agency again dammed the wet land now called Little Lake by raising a 7 foot dam at the point where Mill Brook crosses under North Avenue. The present Little Lake now is about 4–6 feet deep.