John E's Pond or John E's Tug Hole is a

pond A pond is a small, still, land-based body of water formed by pooling inside a depression (geology), depression, either naturally or artificiality, artificially. A pond is smaller than a lake and there are no official criteria distinguishing ...

Block Island Block Island is an island of the Outer Lands coastal archipelago in New England, located approximately south of mainland Rhode Island and east of Long Island's Montauk Point. The island is coterminous with the town of New Shoreham, Rhode Isl ...

Washington County, Rhode Island Washington County, known locally as South County, is a county located in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. As of the 2020 census, the population was 129,839. Rhode Island counties have no governmental functions other than as court administrat ...

. The land around the pond is partially conserved by

The Nature Conservancy The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a global environmental organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, United States. it works via affiliates or branches in 79 countries and territories, as well as across every state in the US. Founded in ...

and by the Block Island Land Trust. The pond is part of a larger network of wet bogs. Historically, it was seasonally dammed to facilitate the harvest of

peat Peat is an accumulation of partially Decomposition, decayed vegetation or organic matter. It is unique to natural areas called peatlands, bogs, mires, Moorland, moors, or muskegs. ''Sphagnum'' moss, also called peat moss, is one of the most ...

and ice. John E's Pond is used recreationally for swimming, fishing, and boating. It is habitat for birds like the

northern harrier The northern harrier (''Circus hudsonius''), also known as the marsh hawk or ring-tailed hawk, is a bird of prey. It breeds throughout the northern parts of the northern hemisphere in Canada and the northernmost United States, USA. The northern ...

, and woody shrubs such as

sweet pepperbush ''Clethra'' is a genus of flowering shrubs or small trees described as a genus by Linnaeus in 1753.possessive apostrophe The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one o ...

. When the name was officialized in 1963, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names allowed the apostrophe to prevent the name from being read as John "Ess" Pond. The word ''tug'' in the term ''tug hole'' archaically means peat, which was the main source of fuel on

for early settlers. ''Tug hole'' is a local term for ponds that were used for harvesting peat (known colloquially as ''tugging'').

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References

{{reflist Lakes of Rhode Island