Colonial Lake
body of water

Colonial Lake is a 25-acre (10 ha) man-made lake along the Shabakunk Creek in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is located on Business Route 1 across from the Lawrence Shopping Center. The lake was created when an earthen dam was constructed across the Shabakunk in 1924 by local housing developers interested in providing recreation opportunities for a nearby development, which became known as Colonial Lakelands. The lake is currently the centerpiece of Lawrence Township's Colonial Lake Park.
“Colonial Lake” enters the record as body of water. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Colonial, Lake and body can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Colonial Lake” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Colonial, Lake and body provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14705467. Authority coordinates are 40.256, -74.724. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colonial Lake” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.