Before the Flood

Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin

Elisabeth C. Rosenberg

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781643136448
• eBook ISBN: 9781643136455
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the tradition of Silent Spring, a modernparable of theAmerican experience and our paradoxical relationship with the natural world. Though it seems a part of the "natural" landscape of New England today, theSwift River Valley reservoir, dam, dike, and nature area was a triumph of civil engineering. It combined forward-looking environmental stewardship and social policy, yet the"little people"—andthefour towns in whichthey lived—got lost alongtheway.Elisabeth Rosenberg has crafted BeforetheFlood to be both a modern and a universal story in a time when managed retreat will one day be a reality. Meticulously researched, BeforetheFlood, is the first narrative book onthe incredible history of the Swift River Valley andthe origins Quabbin Reservoir. Rosenberg dive intothesocioeconomic and psychological aspects oftheSwift River Valley's destruction in order to supply drinking water for the growing populations of Boston and wider Massachusetts. It is as much a human story as the story of water and landscape, and Before the Flood movingly reveals both the stories and the science of the key players and the four flooded towns that were washed forever away.

ONE Birth of a Valley: Prehistory–1900

Ten thousand years ago in what became the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ice Age glaciers retreated. In their place they deposited the riverbeds of the Swift River, three fingerlike branches that flowed southwest to the Connecticut River, west of the geological divide separating the two halves of the state. Had the Swift River flowed east into the Atlantic Seaboard, this story probably never would have happened.

The glaciers cut two parallel valleys: The Connecticut (colloquially known as the Pioneer River) Valley to the west and the Swift River Valley to the east. The Connecticut Valley was broad and fertile. The Swift River Valley was narrow, and lay in shadow.

The native Nipmuc tribes found it, nevertheless, an ideal place to live. They flourished in valley settlements beginning in approximately 1000 B.C.E., primarily along the banks of the Swift River, which was known, even then, for its plentiful fishing.

By the mid 1600s, Massachusetts Bay colonists had established settlements in the central part of the state, outside the Swift River Valley, up to the Connecticut River. These settlements traded with the Nipmuc and their leader, Chief Quabbin, and the neighboring tribes with whom the Nipmuc intermingled. Settlers and Nipmuc were pulled onto opposite sides in the drawn-out colonist–Native American conflict usually called King Philip’s War (1675–1676). After the colonists’ victory, the local Nipmuc not killed were scattered and absorbed into other tribes; arrested and sent to prison or labor camps; or sold into slavery in the West Indies. As a reward for their service, the Massachusetts Bay Colony gave captured Nipmuc land in the Swift River Valley to veterans of the war. This land grab was the first act of defiance against the government, in this case the British—a sign that the colonists could handle affairs by themselves, without any help from the bureaucrats far away.

The settlers, largely Calvinists of Scottish descent, were homesteading in the western part of the state because much of the good land in the east was already being farmed. The colonists given the Swift River Valley were happy to take it for free; in their frugalness, they did not seem to care that the Connecticut Valley, with its superior growing abilities, was just one mountain ridge west.

The 1,200 acres taken from the Nipmuc became the town of Greenwich, the first white settlement inside the Valley, which gradually grew to 25,000 acres and split off into the towns of Dana, Enfield, and Prescott. The first white child was born in Greenwich in 1735.

Shays’ Rebellion

The colonial settlers were fiercely proud of their self-sufficiency and independence from the rest of the state. Many twentieth-century valley residents were descendants of the rebels who fought in Shays’ Rebellion (1786–1787), an unsuccessful uprising against the Massachusetts state government in response to high taxes and economic hardship. Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War hero, led a brigade of 1,100 men to the city of Springfield, thirty miles south, where they attacked the Springfield Arsenal, protesting how the state government had unfairly locked up western Massachusetts debtors. Shays had made his plans in Conkey’s Tavern, in the town of Pelham. The site of the tavern is now under water.

Animosity toward Boston was baked into valley culture in successive generations, reminiscent of how Southerners’ views against the North further hardened after the Civil War. Valley natives always remembered that their forebears had fought the power, lost, and kept going, and the resentment only deepened.

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Puritan influences were still visible in the nineteenth century, primarily a type of harsh spirituality that valued hard work and lack of worldliness. Two hundred years ago it was easy not to be seduced by progressive thought, when the valley’s plentiful resources provided nearly everything. The Swift River produced the power for often prosperous mills and factories—in many places the soil was rich and farming profitable and easy. By the middle of the nineteenth century Enfield was the richest town per capita in the state. Enfield, Dana, and Greenwich all had hotels; Enfield’s Swift River Hotel’s elaborate dining room could seat three hundred guests.

Much of what we know about the intimate history of the valley is due to Enfield native Francis Underwood’s 1893 ethnography Quabbin: The Story of a Small Town with Outlooks on Puritan Life. Underwood, along with a coterie of nineteenth century luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier, was a cofounder of The Atlantic magazine. He was an antislavery crusader and temperance advocate, and, at the end of his life, US ambassador to Scotland.

As Underwood grew older he returned to the Swift River Valley to try to understand the place that had formed him, and to grasp to what extent it had moved beyond the Puritan, antiprogressive culture that had existed even in his childhood. Underwood’s simultaneous disdain of and empathy for the valley’s residents and a longing for the beauty of its hills and waterways were the same amalgam of emotions most reporters attempted to convey throughout their coverage of the valley during the Quabbin project.

Valley residents themselves were not particularly introspective. As in most New England towns, school, church, and town hall were the three pillars of community life. According to Underwood, they found their circumscribed world “cheerful; they knew no other. In the small houses there was no luxury surely, but no lack of wholesome food or seasonable raiment.” This contentment without self-examination, Underwood suggested, caused the valley and its principal town, Enfield, to be “one of the most sluggish of rural communities… not poverty-stricken, but limp and lifeless.”¹

But the nature all around them was exceptionally beautiful. In his return, Underwood relives his childhood wonder about Great Quabbin Mountain: “It was a Delectable Mountain for children. The ascent was easy. To one looking back when half-way up, the village below, nestling under shade trees on both sides of the river, had a soft and almost unreal beauty… The upper region was alpine in its cool serenity, its airy pastures, sparkling brook and broad horizon.”²

The center of the town was the oval-shaped common, half an acre long, and dominating the common was the Congregational church, which was the epicenter of public life for more than a century: “A steeple was set astride the roof; the building was painted white, furnished with green (outside) blinds, and turned with its end to the street. The vane, of sheet metal, gilded, was cut in the form of a man, the head cleaving the wind, and the legs extended for rudder. As it turned with a sharp cry on the rod which pierced its body, it needed but little aid from the imagination of a boy to become the image of some sinner transfixed in air, and held aloft to swing in lingering pain.”³

Men of previous generations had Old Testament names like Hezekiah, Eliphaz, Hosea, and Ezekiel. They followed old Hebrew traditions, like beginning the Sabbath at sundown, not cooking or doing work on “Sabberday,” and ending it when they saw three stars in the sky. These were “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Christians, descendants of the parishioners who had listened to Jonathan Edwards preach in Enfield, Connecticut.

The valley’s relative isolation was reflected in its accents; even into the mid-twentieth century, many of the rural folk spoke Old Yankee—not the dropped Rs and broad vowels of blue-collar Boston, but an accent similar to the traditional Down Mainers—slower and more nasal, with Southern-sounding hints. Recordings as recent as the 1981 documentary The Old Quabbin Valley reflect voices trapped, to modern listeners, in the amber of a lost world.⁴

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During Underwood’s childhood, Enfield was collapsing due to the staggering rates of alcoholism among the town men and even a few of the women; public drunkenness did not seem to be incompatible with twice-on-Sundays church services and a general contempt for secular learning. It took many years of the Congregational minister’s patience before Enfield could dry out, and the years of rampant drunkenness were an influence on Underwood’s temperance.⁵

What did the valley look like in its prime? Outside of town,

Generally a couple of towering elms stood near each farmhouse of the better class, and not far away were apple trees in squares. Clumps of lilacs grew by the front door and by the edge of the garden; while along the neighboring road were rows of balloon-topped maples.

The farms lying without the valley were and still are poor; their plain lands sometimes bore thin crops of rye, and then, lying fallow, were overrun with mullein; their undrained meadows were cold and wet, and infested with poison ivy and skunk cabbage; their hillsides rough and stony; their pastures gray and brown. The neighborhood roads were crooked, hilly, or stony and sandy.

The houses of prosperous farmers were neat and comfortable, though invariably plain; but those of the poorer sort were miserable. Still, few farmers were educated beyond the 3 Rs, or were in the habit of reading in hours of leisure, except for the Bible and weekly newspaper.⁶

Everyone in the valley knew how to read and write. But like many rural school systems, valley schools only went up through eighth and occasionally ninth grade.

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, despite telegraphs, telephones, electricity, and automobiles in the village centers, country people still lived more like their parents and grandparents than the radio-listening, train-traveling, shimmying townsfolk. The farmers’ furniture was “utilitarian, comfortable, serviceable—but nothing like what you might call high-class furnishings.” Men wore bib overalls and straw hats. Women almost always wore aprons and long skirts.⁷

Outsiders, though, found it a restful and refreshing place to spend a week on vacation. The back of a 1910 postcard of Greenwich Village reads, “Mama and I walked to this pretty little village this morning… It was perfectly beautiful. We picked berries coming back and had a lovely time. You ought to see my mother climb a fence! Lovingly, Florence.” On the front, she adds, “This is Mt. Pomeroy, which rises right above the lake from the hotel. I am watching the sun behind it now.”⁸

Families were connected by complex marital and genealogical bonds, and everyone knew by heart who had married into what families. When University of Massachusetts at Amherst linguistic historian Audrey Duckert recorded valley natives in the 1970s, they could rattle off lists of marriages, remarriages, deaths, accidents, illnesses, successes, failures, and personal eccentricities of people with whom they had second- or third-degree connections. Family, like land, was paramount, and the work of generations made the success of the land possible. Ancestors were always visible, and the connection was strong.

Gradually—and not always happily for the natives—the Puritan influences were worn down, as they always are, and broader thought and culture began to take their place. The lions in front of the New York Public Library, for instance, were sculpted by Enfield native Edward Clark Potter. A few men went to college; young women went to boarding or finishing school and then came back, only to leave again. Newspapers were delivered by the new train. But at the same time that expansiveness caused a brain drain. The population grew smaller and grayer, and those graying valley citizens had strong and settled views about political and religious differences, which were often one and the same: “A Massachusetts Federalist prior to 1810 was almost certain to be Orthodox [Calvinist] in faith; a church member was almost certain to be a Federalist… and it was generally the case that a Democrat was a Universalist, a Freethinker, or one of the ‘otherwise-minded.’ The wealthy, respectable and temperate people were Federalists, and supporters, if not members, of the Puritan church. Outside were Democrats, hard drinkers, and deists. For more than a generation the line of demarcation was invariable. The hostile feeling between the classes deepened often into malignant hate, and was felt wherever men came into contact.”⁹

Many of their world views, which Underwood probably exaggerates, but probably not by much, are familiar even in twenty-first-century America:

The Quabbin man of the better sort believed the Bible to be inspired, in mass and in detail, from Genesis to Revelation; the Unitarianism and Universalism were doctrines of devils; that Methodists and Baptists were well-meaning people but blown about by the winds of doctrine; that the cross was a symbol of popery, and Christmas a superstitious observance; that the Federalists inherited the wisdom and virtues of Washington… that in a great city there were few honest men and fewer virtuous women… that the young men to be helped in ‘gittin’ college larnin’ were the ones intended to be preachers; that a lawyer was necessarily a dissembler and a cheat; that “old-fashioned schoolin” was good enough; that a man who wore a beard was a Jew, or a dirty fellow, or both… that all the songs sung at church will be sung in heaven; and that the good old days of samp, hulled corn, bean porridge, barreled apple sauce, apprentiship, honest work, and homespun clothes were gone, never to return.¹⁰

Ethnic and cultural homogeneity began to break down near the close of the nineteenth century. Smith’s Village, as a de facto company town, hired many Northern Irish families as mill workers; the marketing materials for the mill advertised that they were Protestant,¹¹but they were “clannish” and never assimilated. Then the Italians and French Canadians came to work in Dana’s box and hat factories. Then the Poles came to buy cheap land and farm it. No open animosity existed between the old-timers and the newcomers; the newcomers simply didn’t integrate, and the natives didn’t bother, either.

Underwood died in 1894, aware that the valley was growing increasingly lifeless and sad: “It seems the crops have decreased; the great barns are no longer bursting with hay… all the people are fed with Western beef and flour. Many farms, though not abandoned, yield little return… The owners must pick up a living as best they can; the thin and stony soil can do no more for them. Their sons are away in the cities, or in the far West, and their daughters are teachers, or are married and settled, and not in Quabbin.”¹²

A year later, the first exploratory engineers began to fill five-gallon jugs of Swift River water and take them back by carriage to Boston. Enfield’s population had shrunk to less than one thousand.

The Towns

Even during the nineteenth century, “Swift River Valley,” “Quabbin,” and “Enfield” were popularly conflated. The valley was also called “Quabbin.” Enfield was sometimes called “Quabbin.” Because outsiders often never got past Enfield, the most conventionally “town-like” of the villages, “Enfield” also might refer to the valley as a whole.

The Swift River Valley was actually comprised of four towns—Enfield, Dana, Greenwich, and Prescott—and a number of villages associated with each.

Enfield was the largest of the four towns, with the greatest concentration of wealth and social capital. Enfield Center was arrayed like a standard New England small town, with a grassy common in the center surrounded by grand homes, the church, the school, agricultural Grange Hall, and the town hall. Main ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Introduction: “A Well-Watered Place”
• Chapter One: Birth of a Valley: Prehistory–1900
• Chapter Two: A Long, Slow Decline: 1880–1920
• Chapter Three: Boston’s Thirst for Water: 1630–1930
• Chapter Four: Plans for the Reservoir and New Experiences for the Engineers: 1926–1930
• Chapter Five: The Engineers Arrive: 1926–1930
• Chapter Six: ‘ Human Moles’: 1929
• Chapter Seven: Poverty and Wealth
• Chapter Eight: Exams and Promotions—and, Finally, a Name: 1931–1932
• Chapter Nine: “The Bends”: 1932–1935
• Chapter Ten: Social Organizations and Entertainment
• Chapter Eleven: All Hell Breaks Loose: 1936
• Chapter Twelve: The Calm Before: 1937
• Chapter Thirteen: Quabbin Park Cemetery
• Chapter Fourteen: The End of Everything: 1938
• Chapter Fifteen: Two Dances, an Auction, and a Hurricane
• Chapter Sixteen: “Valley of a Thousand Smokes”: 1939
• Chapter Seventeen: Preparing the Path to Boston—And to War: 1940–1941
• Chapter Eighteen: The War and After: 1942–1946
• Chapter Nineteen: Conclusion: Modern “Letters” from Quabbin
• Chapter Twenty: Coda: Their Own Words
• Photographs
• Appendix A: A Quabbin Timeline
• Appendix B: People Mentioned in This Book
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Endnotes
• Copyright