Our December group hike Saturday was at the 9,500 acre Sandisfield State Forest on the York Lake Loop Trail built by the CCC during the great depression. York Lake is a shallow 35 acre man-made lake at 1,544 ft. of elevation. It is fed by Sandy Brook, a tributary of the Farmington and Connecticut Rivers. This water eventually flows a distance of 115 miles where it empties into Long Island Sound. It was named for Samuel A. York, a gentleman farmer of Cummington, who served as Commissioner of the Department of Conservation from 1933-35. The land here was originally farmland and part of one of the original settlements of Western Mass known as township number three, Sandisfield was incorporated in 1762. Most of the farmers here left for the West after the Civil War for better farmland.

This abandoned land as most of our State Forests today, was reforested by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They created areas like York Lake for outdoor recreation. In 1933 to 1936, 200 men were stationed here in camp 196 Company to work for a dollar a day. They built roads, controlled insect infestation, built fire ponds, and reforested the land with norway spruce and red pine #massdcr

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