By Joan Macri

While no one can say for sure, according to an article in the Lewiston Evening Journal in the 1940’s by Stanley B. Attwood, a woman named Mrs. Ruby A. Briggs maintained that a Thomas Taylor and his brother Joshua had a land grant dating back to the 1700’s (400 acres) between the Androscoggin River and Wilson’s Great Pond (now Lake Auburn) that may have surrounded the entirety of Taylor Pond. In “Now and Then at Taylor Pond” by Helen Andrews (1985), several other theories are offered in addition to the Taylor brothers concerning various Tylors and Tylers dating back to early land grants as far back as 1735. The surveyor Phillip Bullen’s map of the area, drawn in 1798, does contain the name Wilson’s Great Pond but no label on our favorite lake.