In 1917, Ashley Pond, a former Roosevelt Rough Rider, established the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys in the Jemez Mountains north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

On the grounds was a small lake that the school used for a water supply and the students used for swimming and boating in the summer and ice-skating in the winter. According to some stories, the boys comically called the pool "Ashley Pond" to the apparent annoyance of the school's director.

The ranch school's ice house, used to store the blocks of ice cut during the winter, stood on the pond banks.

In 1943, the U.S. Army commandeered the school property in order to begin constructing atomic research laboratories for the Manhattan Project. For the remainder of World War II, the Ice House served as one of the facilities for developing the project's "Gadget" prototype that scientists detonated with the Trinity test more than two hundred miles south of Los Alamos at White Sands, New Mexico.

Although the government demolished the original structure in the 1960s, a memorial stands near the edge of the water as a reminder of the Ice House.

Ashley Pond serves as both an aesthetic centerpiece of Los Alamos and a reminder of the community's complex Ranch School to Cold War history.

Podcast Written and Narrated by Wes Meiss, Public History Student at the University of West Florida.