 The shore of Mashapaug Pond between Niantic and Huntington Avenue served as a home to the West Elmwood neighborhood, one of the first racially integrated neighborhoods in America.West Elmwood was home to approximately 500 families, offering them an intimate, secluded community, but with the bordering highways still providing access to the larger world.As issues of racial integration became more important in the United States in the 1960s, similar interactions were occurring on a local, neighborhood level in West Elmwood.