Lake Ronkonkoma (lake)
| Lake Ronkonkoma | |
|---|---|
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| Location | Suffolk County, New York, United States |
| Coordinates | 40°49′42″N 073°07′18″W / 40.82833°N 73.12167°W |
| Type | kettle lake |
| Primary inflows | groundwater |
| Primary outflows | underground |
| Basin countries | United States |
| Surface area | 243 acres (0.98 km2) |
| Max. depth | 95 ft (29 m) |
| Surface elevation | 52 ft (16 m) |
Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island's largest freshwater lake, is in Suffolk County, New York, United States, and has a circumference of about 2 miles (3.2 km), and is 0.65 miles (1.05 km) across on average. A kettle lake formed by retreating glaciers, it is owned by the Town of Islip under the terms of the Nichols Patent. The land around it is controlled by three town governments - Smithtown, Islip and Brookhaven. The separation originated because three different Indian communities claimed lands on different shores, and these claims continued when the tribes gave separate deeds to the land under their control. The name Ronkonkoma comes from an Algonquian expression meaning "boundary fishing-lake", also earlier written as Raconkumake and Raconkamuck.
Smithtown founder Richard Smith's original holdings included the headwaters of the Nissequogue River east to a "freshwater pond called Raconkamuck," which translates as "the boundary fishing place" in the Algonquian language. What is now known as Lake Ronkonkoma served as a boundary between lands occupied by four Indian communities: Nissequogues, Setaukets, Secatogues and Unkechaugs.
The Smithtown side of the lake was settled by the 1740s, but it was not until the late 1890s that the area gained widespread public attention. That's when boarding houses and hotels were erected to accommodate a growing number of tourists drawn by claims that the lake's waters had special healing powers. By the 1920s, beach pavilions had sprung up. The Long Island Rail Road, which was completed to nearby Lakeland in 1842 (the depot was moved to Ronkonkoma in 1883), helped transform what had been a sleepy farming hamlet.
The Lake was created by a retreating glacier. Portions of its irregular basin are unusually deep for Long Island, but most of the lake is less than 15 feet (4.6 m) deep. As a rule of thumb, it is unproductive to fish deeper than 15 feet (4.6 m) in Lake Ronkonkoma because there is seldom enough dissolved oxygen to sustain fish beyond this depth. The primary gamefish are Largemouth bass and smallmouth bass.
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