Giuffrida Park offers plenty of hiking and restful beauty. The park in Meriden includes a stone-dammed reservoir built by the Bradley and Hubbard Manufacturing Company for use in the 1800s, when the city was a hub for manufacturing.
International Silver acquired the property as a source of water needed for its manufacturing processes. Time passed, International Silver moved, then became virtually extinct.
Eventually, the property was offered for sale and the Connecticut Light and Power Company (CL&P) purchased it and installed high voltage lines required for energy transmission and growth in the nearby Westfield section of Middletown and Connecticut.
The remainder of the land was purchased by the city under the open spaces program. Today it is a park that offers trails that wind through woods, old fields, around Crescent Lake (that's the water body created by the dam), and up to the peak of a mountain (a very steep climb) known as Chauncey Peak (shown above, right.)
The rocky summit is part of the Metacomet Ridge that extends from Long Island Sound near New Haven (Connecticut) north through the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts to the Vermont border.
