Naming Lake Fred

By Tom Kinsella

“I don’t think there’s any one of us, no matter where we live, who doesn’t have a secret place, whatever it is. It’s like Oz. … There’s a nostalgia for an unlived past.” Jean Shepherd

Although ocean tides rise and fall a scant ten miles from New Jersey’s ������, the mighty Atlantic is not the most celebrated or consequential body of water on campus. That honor, without question, falls to , the one-time South Jersey cedar bog and stream, dammed in the late eighteenth century to provide waterpower for a long-gone sawmill and later worked as a productive cranberry bog. Lake Fred, actually a series of linked ponds about a half-mile long and a quarter mile wide, is the environmental centerpiece of ������, the original “quad” around which the campus was built. Since the opening of the University in 1971, classes have been held on the south shore of the lake.¹ Student activities, many if not all, have been held on the north shore. 

In the early days, when the campus was new and before dorms and support buildings were built, student activities centered in and around several cabins on the north shore, the vacation retreats of previous property owners. The Hansen Cabin accommodated the president’s office, but three other cabins remained for student use. Cabin 2 housed the school newspaper, The Argo, first published in the fall of 1971; Cabin 3 hosted keg parties (among other campus activities); and Cabin 4 was devoted in part to religious services that helped foster a vibrant ecumenical fellowship. There was a , a weight room, canoe rentals, and more. There was community. Early students spent a lot of time on the north side of the lake and today’s students do too.  

In a noteworthy act of concurrence, the likes of which has not been seen since, the early ������ community devised and quietly agreed upon a name for this central lake. In less than two years, without official proclamation, students, staff, and faculty chose the rather prosaic name that it bears today. Theirs was an act of youthful self-identification. What follows is the story of how Lake Fred got its name.

Before the arrival of students in 1971 the lake had another name. According to long-time resident John Lingelbach, who described from memory the campus landscape as it looked in the 1920s, the lake was known as Saw Mill Pond, the name conveying a cultural memory stretching back over 200 years to the first industrial use of the water shed.²      

In the 1950s and 60s, the name remained in use among local residents. The families who jointly owned more than 600 acres north of the lake incorporated under the name Saw Mill Ponds.³ ������ never adopted the name. On early college construction maps, the lake is usually depicted without a name. Sometimes it is labeled “water” or “lake.” Early building reports refer to “College Lake,” and at least once in early 1972 it was referred to as “Lake ������.”⁴ Yet by early 1973 there is no question about the name. It was Fred.

The Folklore

No official document christens the lake. No elaborate naming ceremony took place. Today, 50 years after the founding of the college, the mechanism of naming has become obscure, a matter of folklore. Still, several competing stories can be identified that purport to explain the name Fred. The first widely known story describes the naming of several campus features by early faculty member Claude Epstein, who was engaged in mapping the environment of the campus. The name, Epstein is reputed to have explained, was a whimsical choice, inspired by 1950–60s radio personality Jean Shepherd, who used “Fred” as a generic name for someone who was goofy, a dork, or a lay about. In this story the small non-lake was given a nondescript name. It had after all spent most of its history, pre-nineteenth century, as a swampy stream. The story seems plausible. Early ������ was an iconoclastic place: it does not, however, explain the naming of ������’s other lake, Pam.