the United States Salem is the site of one of the first rural electrification projects in the country, at the farm of Frederick C. Rawolle Jr. Rawolle was an engineer from New York who retired at the age of 32 after he sold to a major manufacturer the patent rights of an explosive device he had invented to fracture oil wells. His net worth at this time was approximately $50,000,000, an enormous sum for the time period. He decided to settle in the remote woods of Salem and build a farm, purchasing of land between 1917 and 1924, completely surrounding Mountain Lake and Fairy Lake. This land, once called Paugwonk, had been jointly owned by a Niantic sachem named Sanhop, a Mohegan named Chappattoe and another kinsman from Uncas. The combined area became known as Fairy Lake Farm, located near the lake of the same name. Carr Pond, which today supplies water to the city of New London, was created by Rawolle in 1920 from Fairy Lake as a means of docking his boat near the turnpike. Rawolle decided to generate his own electricity when he learned that bringing transmission lines to his farm from the city of New London, about away, would be virtually impossible. At a cost of about one million dollars, extremely expensive at the time for a single project, a hydroelectric system was completed in 1922. Airplanes flying from New York to Boston used the glimmering lights of Fairy Lake Farm as guidance. Rawolle also opened a store in New London to sell produce from the farm. This endeavor collapsed, however, when the stock market crashed in 1929 and Rawolle lost all of his money. He died in 1954; the large stone mansion he lived in at the farm is still standing at the end of Horse Pond Road, though it is abandoned. Hiram Bingham III and IV Hiram Bingham III, from Salem, was an adventurer, U.S. senator, and explorer who rediscovered Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911. He retrieved artifacts for Yale University, which in 2011 returned many items to Cusco, Peru, pursuant to an agreement with the Peruvian government. His son, Hiram Bingham IV, was the Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and rescued thousands of Jews from death at the Nazi concentration camps. Much of the Bingham family still lives in Salem and is active in town politics and local