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"The railroad, which caused the relocation of the commercial center of the town and made Rocky Nook accessible as a resort area, also led to the development of the Silver Lake area as a recreational attraction. The lovely lake – over six miles around – surrounded by trees and sandy beaches, where once the women of the colony had beaten their flax, was a natural attraction, of course, and in the days before the city of Brockton took it over for water supply, a popular place for swiping and boating activities – thousands came just to watch sculling races on the long, narrow lake.

The boilers in steam ships and steam powered locomotives were prone to explosion and fire. Kingston's Lady of the Lake suffered the same fate as many other steam powered cousins of the late 18th and early 19th century.

By the 1860s, Silver Lake Grove (much of it in Plympton) was a weekend destination for railroad cars bearing hundreds of family groups, Sunday school outings, fraternal organizations and other fun lovers. A promotional program for the season that opened June 1, 1877, touts the facilities as having 30 of the 70 acres enclosed, a pavilion seating several thousand, bowling alleys, baseball field, rowboats, flying horses (a merry-go-round), experienced caterers, hydrants to supply the hoses used for keeping the dust down – all this and more only one hour by train from Boston!

It was this year of 1877 that brought disaster to Silver Lake Grove and began its rapid decline. Three years earlier, the steamer Glide from Newburyport had been sailed down to Captains’ Hill in Duxbury and 16 pair of oxen dragged her overland to Silver Lake. On a sunny June afternoon in 1877, a couple of parties of young people from Boston churches were aboard the re-christened Lady of the Lake as the vessel toured the blue waters; she had traveled the length of the lake, made a turn and come a third of the way back when there was a terrible explosion.

The vessel stayed afloat, but the force of the explosion was such that the boiler from the doomed vessel landed on shore. Hot coals caused horrible burns; the doctors from Plymouth and Kingston, arriving on a special train, had no salve and had to use the grease from the locomotive as dressing for the terrible injuries. No lives were lost by drowning, but two adults and three children died from blood poisoning.

The floating hulk was towed to the Plympton shores, where she was vandalized over the years and gradually disappeared from view until in 1972 the 52 foot keel was rediscovered through the curiosity and detective work of Donald Randall of Halifax, a mathematics teacher for many years at Silver Lake Regional High School across Lake Street from the body of water from which the school derived its name.

In the judgment of Mister Randall, the coup de grace was given to the Silver Lake Grove by an 1878 disaster on the tracks of the Old Colony Railroad in Wollaston, when, just one year after the steamer explosion an 18 car train jammed with Silver Lake Grove excursionists hit an open switch near Norfolk Downs in the Wollaston section of Quincy and over 100 passengers were killed or injured. By 1882, Silver Lake Grove had petered out."

Source: Major Bradford's Town: A History of Kingston by Doris Johnson Melville