The town also contains many inland ponds or small lakes, such as Bog Meadow Pond, Round Pond, Long Pond, Cranberry Pond, Mine Pond, Popolopen Lake and Highland Lake. Strangely enough, many of these ponds have been left without more appropriate names. This Highland Lake, just south of Fort Montgomery, is about 150 feet above the Hudson, and about half a mile long by one-eighth of a mile wide, and is fed by its own springs. "Blood Lake" and "Hessian Lake" are some of its more ancient appellations, bestowed, according to Revolutionary tradition, because of a company of Hessians who were slain there when Sir Henry Clinton captured Fort Montgomery. It is now proposed by the New York authorities to locate a new State Prison in the vicinity of this lake, which is northwest of Iona Island in the Hudson. Most of the region in that immediate section is a wild rocky forest, and sparsely populated. Half a mile or more west of the river, however, there is a comparatively level plateau, some 200 acres in extent, from which a fine view of both reaches of the Hudson is obtained. This is included in the site which has been selected for the prison. Part of it, however, extends over into Rockland County. This property, which consists of some 500 acres, was purchased by the State for this prison site, in December, 1907, at a cost of $75,000. It is about six miles below Highland Falls, and it includes Highland Lake and its entire watershed. Whether the name of this new prison will be selected from the classic nomenclature which prevails in that locality, such as "Doodletown," or "Popolopen," remains to be seen. "Doodletown Bight," is the classic name handed down from the Colonial period, which is here applied to a small bay in the Hudson where small water craft find a safe and pleasant harbor. The new State road which is to run from the New Jersey line to Albany, will pass through the eastern side of this new prison tract. Bear Mountain, on the west, has an inexhaustible supply of granite well suited for building purposes. EARLY SETTLEMENT. As before stated, the ancient records are almost devoid of names of early settlers in this immediate region, and the presumption is that these settlers were comparatively few. Major Boynton, in his history of West point says: "The interval between the granting of the patents and the transfer of the titles, down to the period at which the American Revolution commenced, are blanks in historical literature. No traditions even of early settlers are extant, and the probabilities are that, beyond a settlement made to secure a site or grant, West Point, being in a region of stratified rocks, heavily covered with drift deposits, and without a suitable soil for cultivation, remained a mere woodland tract, possessing no higher value than attaches to similar adjoining points in the Highlands which have remained unsettled and uncultivated to this day."