May 2, 2008

Residents still remember ‘lost’ towns

Depression-era reservoir project claimed four communities in Massachusetts

WARE, MASS.

At 12:01 a.m. on April 28, 1938, four valley towns in western Massachusetts ceased to exist — their main streets and family farms soon to become the silty bottom of the massive Quabbin reservoir.

Seventy years later, the Quabbin’s importance as one of America’s largest man-made water sources is unchallenged. Trillions of litres from the reservoir have sustained greater Boston’s growth for decades and the watershed, now teeming with wildlife, has become an environmental treasure.

Yet for remaining natives of the four “lost towns,” all now in their 70s or older, nostalgia blends with sorrow and occasional flashes of bitterness. They continue to gather at least once a month to reminisce, clinging tenaciously to the bonds their families forged in towns long since erased from the map.

Each native has a story: passing cemeteries as ancestors’ bodies were moved, watching helplessly as grandparents cried in frustration, realizing the drinking water of strangers had been deemed more important than their families’ roots.

“That was the only place we’d ever known,” Bob Wilder, an Enfield native, said of the hardscrabble farming town his family left in 1938 when he was a boy. “I try not to get mad when I think about it anymore, but that was home. I can’t really ever go home.”

The Quabbin area, named for a Nipmuck Indian word that roughly translates to “the meeting place of many waters,” had almost 2,700 residents at the turn of the 20th century when it caught the eye of state planners.

Many families, including Wilder’s, had settled there before the Revolutionary War.

Its modest population, clean rivers and attractive topography — all among the reasons many families had stayed for generations — also led to its downfall as planners sought sites for a reservoir to meet Boston’s growing demand.

The state’s Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission and state lawmakers made it official in 1927, picking the valley and setting up funds for the reservoir.

Even the money that residents received under eminent domain — an average of US$108 per acre, about US$1,600 in today’s dollars — was inadequate to many who tried to set up new farms, businesses and lives amid strangers in that Depression era.

By the time the towns of Enfield, Dana, Prescott and Greenwich were dissolved, many families already had given up the fight, buying new homes elsewhere with their payoffs or having their old post-and-beam homes taken apart and rebuilt in nearby towns.

“The houses came down. We were scattered,” said 94-year-old Anne Bullock, whose family moved out of Enfield and who met her future husband when he worked on the reservoir project.

When the last residents were out of the towns, construction crews razed the remaining structures down to the stone foundations and empty cellar holes.

When the valley was cleared, the Swift River was unleashed. Within seven years, much of the area was under up to 46 metres of water.

Dana’s former town common is an exception, a spot in the protected watershed where hikers follow crumbling bits of road past old foundations and stone walls as they follow streets that disappear at the water’s edge.

Associated Press

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