Before the Flood: Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin by Elisabeth C. Rosenberg
A hundred years ago, there were 355 municipalities in Massachusetts. Today there are 351 cities and towns. This book recounts the destruction of four small towns in western Massachusetts in order to construct the Quabbin Reservoir, a 39-square mile lake that provides water for eastern Massachusetts. In 1938, the towns of Enfield, Dana, Prescott and Greenwich were disincorporated. In 1939, the land where the towns stood for generations was flooded with 412 billion gallons of water.
The book tells the tale of how four places that had been home to thousands of people over the centuries were wiped off the map. Historically, land development and population movement has depended on having enough water. Since its founding in 1630, Boston was on a constant quest to find new sources of water for its growing population. Over the years, several new supplies were developed, including the Wachusetts Reservoir which took some land from four towns and opened in 1908. People realized that something bigger was needed to meet the demand for water for Boston and other growing communities. In 1922, engineers developed a plan to flood towns to create the Quabbin Reservoir. In 1927 and 1928, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Ware River Act and the Swift River Act which set the wheels in motion to build the new water source.
It would take twelve years to complete the project, the first few of which would be used to survey the land and take pictures of every natural and manmade structure in the area. Engineers, a relatively new profession, came from MIT and Northeastern University to do the work. It was no surprise that the locals resented these young men who moved into their towns in order to plan their destruction: “They were looked upon as foreigners, sent to wrest the land from the natives.…”
The author makes the point that initially local residents blamed the people working on the project for taking their land instead of focusing their ire on the Boston power brokers who put the deal together. The region had a history of facing off against the government, including Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, which brought armed farmers together to protest high taxes and poor economic conditions which they blamed on Massachusetts politicians. But the four small communities lacked the political chops needed to stop the Quabbin project.
Enfield was the wealthiest of the four towns targeted for elimination. It had stores, a hotel, a big church and a bustling town hall. The other communities were more agrarian, with some manufacturing, but they still managed to provide a good living for their residents. Despite the prosperity of the four towns over the years, by the 1920s, the local economy was faltering. Residents did not embrace modern technology like radios and telephones and even after they decided to embrace modernity, the isolation of the towns kept technology away. As manufacturing came to the area in the early 1900s, immigrants from Europe flooded the valley and caused resentment among the lifelong residents. As autos became the main transportation means, new roads were built all over the Commonwealth. Because the local topography was rocky and the population low, there just weren’t any new roads built in the four-town area. Jobs dried up. Farmers found it difficult to comply with increasing health and safety regulations coming from Boston, and many gave up. Young people increasingly left the area for greener pastures in Springfield and Holyoke. By the time the engineers started their work, the local population had dropped dramatically. At the time when the state was working to eliminate these four towns, residents had very little clout at the State House.
Boston’s population, 125,000 in 1845, had grown to 525,000 by 1897, with another million people in the metro water district. As the 20th century dawned, it was clear that metro Boston needed a dedicated water source. The Swift and Ware Rivers in western Massachusetts had very pure water and they ran the right way to form a reservoir. After about ten years of wrangling, legislation was enacted in 1927 that created the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission (MDWSC), which would oversee the Quabbin construction project. Frank Winsor, a respected hydraulics engineer with a doctorate from Brown University, headed the group. The commission was staffed by the usual assortment of appointees, most of whom were well qualified with the occasional political hack thrown in. They came up with an engineering plan which included digging seven or eight shafts, 200 to 600 feet deep; a major diversion tunnel; a large dam and a dike; and ancillary support structure and roads. The project was to take twelve years to complete. Local officials sued the state but the US Supreme Court found that the construction project was allowed under Massachusetts law.
Contemporary articles in Boston newspapers painted the local residents as backward yokels, but the engineers who came to the valley soon realized that this wasn’t the case. There certainly were a number of eccentric people who essentially lived by themselves in the more isolated parts of the region, but most people were pretty normal. They read the two Springfield daily newspapers and those with radios checked out local stations. There was no local movie theater but every week people could watch films in a makeshift theater that was set up in the town hall. As was the case all over America, people joined clubs - the Masons, the women’s Quabbin Club, and the Grange, which all offered a range of activities to entertain people as well as do various volunteer projects in the community to help those in need.
Construction began in 1928 with bunkhouses and latrines being the first items to go up. The Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission purchased a mansion in Enfield and set up an office. Other buildings were acquired to provide additional office space as well as residences for workers. As the project developed, more engineers were hired from MIT, NU and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Many of the workers became friendly with townspeople. Eventually some project people married local women. Most workers were single and well behaved, perhaps because Prohibition outlawed alcohol.
Real estate assessors came in to negotiate buying all of the property in the four towns that would be flooded. They weren’t very popular but the record shows that people received fair compensation for their land.
Perhaps the most impressive feat was digging the massive 40-foot tunnels, 200 to 600-feet deep, that would carry the water. The engineers made huge underground excavations and set up camp as the work progressed. Every six feet of rock blasting used 100 pounds of dynamite. Machines pulverized the rock which was brought up and used it for mortar as needed or saved for fill for the dam. The men looked like miners as they came up out of the ground for breaks during the day. After almost two years of drilling and blasting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the first tunnel was completed in late 1928. Over the next few years, more tunnels were completed with great fanfare. The men working on the project took great pride in what they were accomplishing and bonded together, almost like soldiers in combat.
By 1932, the surveying was completed as photographers continued to document everything. More engineers were needed than were available, so project leaders devised certification tests that would let an individual short-circuit getting a college degree in order to work on the project. These hires were not licensed engineers but they were skilled enough to do a lot of the work. The reservoir project was one of the few places in Massachusetts that offered good jobs at good wages during the Depression.
The next phase of the project involved building the dam and dike. Much of this work was underground, and engineers had to figure out how to deal with the constant water seepage. They developed ways to use air pressure to keep work areas dry, but the workers had to come to the surface slowly to avoid cramps due to the artificial air pressure.
For Christmas 1934, residents decorated a Christmas tree in Enfield. By then, electricity had been turned off, but the local power company arranged for the lights to be lit. It was kind of sad, but people came from miles around to see the tree. In May of 1935, the local train to Springfield had its last run. The cars were overflowing as the train stopped twenty times along the way for people to take pictures of the hollowed-out towns.
By 1936, most traces of the towns had been eradicated. A major snow and rain storm hit in the early spring of that year, causing massive flooding that jeopardized the living quarters of many of the people working on the project. UMass (then known as Massachusetts State College) and Amherst College opened up their facilities for nine days to accommodate people who had been flooded out.
An election was to be held in Massachusetts in 1936. Governor James Michael Curley was running for US Senate. Always looking for a political edge, he realized that the Quabbin Reservoir project was going to hire 5,000 men to clear trees to prepare the reservoir to receive over 400 billion gallons of water. The pay was high by Depression standards and no experience was necessary. The first jobs went to local citizens, including men on welfare. Curley managed to get thousands of his boys on the payroll, including some recently released from prison.
Unlike the high-level engineering needed to build the reservoir’s infrastructure, these jobs were for anyone. Supervision was lax, more of a Works Project Administration (WPA) job than a professional one. Curley’s troops were given the nickname “woodpeckers” since they were noisy and got little done. Many had never worked; all were loyal Democrats whose parents would vote for Curley for Senate. (Curley ended up losing to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) Unlike the young engineers who had come to the area ten years earlier, these people drank a lot, caroused and fought, and got arrested. They, at 2,200 strong, outnumbered everyone else left in the valley.
Wednesday was payday and the Boston boys raised hell as they went to the town of Ware to cash their checks. The Quabbin Reservoir managers who were in charge of the tree-clearing crews could not keep the boys under control. Dr. Winsor, the head of the state commission in charge of the Quabbin project, reached out to Governor Curley to try to get him to calm his charges down but that didn’t work.
In August of 1936, the Enfield Congregational Church, the major gathering place in the region for generations, burned down. Authorities suspected arson, but no one was ever charged. Local residents, who had already had to leave their lifetime homes, were devastated. It was a bad few years for locals.
By early 1937, the tree clearing was finished and the woodpeckers went home. You will not be surprised to learn that a lot of the work that the little peckers did was substandard and that many new crews of tree clearers had to be brought in to finish the task.
Most of the buildings had been razed and the few that were left were being moved to other locations, including Vermont. More than 7,600 bodies were exhumed from local cemeteries and re-buried in the new Quabbin park and in other cemeteries that were still on dry ground. The grave diggers were paid very well and took great pride in their jobs.
The dam and dike construction was underway, with 500,000 tons of earth and rocks being dumped as the base of the dam. They were also building the pressure tunnels that would force the water on its way to metro Boston. By now, many of the engineers who had worked on the reservoir were burned out and left for other jobs.
In February of 1938, Enfield held its last election for local officials. While few if anyone lived there by then, it was still a town and elections were on the calendar. In April they held the last town meeting. As their last official act, the people voted to appropriate $1,800 for a monument to be placed in the new Quabbin Park, honoring World War 1 veterans.
The Enfield Fire Department organized a Farewell Ball on April 27, 1938. It was packed, with a thousand people unable to get into the town hall. There were speeches and grand marches and tears. The band played Auld Lang Syne at midnight, the time that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts officially took over control of the four towns. The next day, auctioneers came in to sell everything - school desks, text books, fire trucks, office equipment, and such.
Things could get worse. On September 21, 1938, the No Name Hurricane roared through western Massachusetts, killing over one hundred people and flooding thousands of acres. It also ripped up thousands of trees that were going to be sold by the state to help pay for the reservoir.
By early 1939, the major work was finished. The remaining buildings were razed and any trees and shrubs were flattened by bulldozers. Organic material such as loam had to be removed from the land to prevent contamination of the reservoir’s water. In August, all was ready. The tunnel that had been diverting river water was closed and 500,000 gallons of water entered the reservoir each day. Two weeks later, Hitler invaded Poland.
In October of 1939, the Christian Science Monitor ran a story of the project, criticizing it for costing more than the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River which was built around the same time. The costs were similar; Hoover came in at $49 million and Quabbin was $52 million. I have been to both the Hoover Dam and the Quabbin Reservoir and there is no comparison in the “wow” factor. Hoover is literally awesome while Quabbin is merely nice. However, constructing Quabbin seems to me to have been much more difficult. Hoover is big but it's basically a dam across a river. Quabbin is anchored on a series of tunnels and shafts that were very challenging to pull off. Hoover took five years to build; Quabbin was a twelve-year undertaking. The article does note that the Massachusetts project came in $13 million under budget and was on time. That doesn’t happen today.
Boston got its first water from the project on October 22, 1940. Even at a rate of 500,000 million gallons a day, it took over a year to get enough water into the reservoir to develop the pressure needed to send it eastward. Governor Leverett Saltonstall gave a speech to mark the opening, praising “a huge network of earthworks, concrete walls, tunnels and engineering marvels.”
World War II was on the horizon so US authorities decided to build an air base to ward off potential enemy attacks on Quabbin, a vital state resource. The new Chicopee Air Base, which later became Westover Air Force Base, was constructed in record time.
The Winsor Dam, the main earthworks that was named after the director of the project who died shortly before construction was finished, was formally dedicated in June of 1941. It was a small event, attended by only a few people who were still associated with the project. The Boston newspapers didn’t even cover the event, but the Quabbin Reservoir was supplying billions of gallons of water to people all over the eastern part of the state.
After the US became involved in WWII, Quabbin became an important part of the war effort. The roads around the project were used to train soldiers to drive at night. Pilots from the air base flew practice missions over the dam. As many as 26 four-engine bombers would take off at one time on practice bombing runs without dropping any real ones. It was quite the spectacle that impressed the locals. Artillery troops practiced their craft shooting at hills around Quabbin.
At the end of the book, author Elisabeth Rosenberg makes the point that the construction of the Quabbin reservoir was different from similar massive public works projects in that many of the people who came into the area for the project became permanent residents after it was finished.
There certainly were tensions between local residents and the outside interlopers who were building the reservoir, but over time a grudging respect actually turned into friendship for many. She attributes this to the fact that Quabbin was an intimate project that went on for twelve years, enough time for people to get to know each other.
People from the four towns that were lost because of Quabbin certainly were not happy at their fate, but most could understand that creating a massive reservoir that would supply much of the state with all of the water it would need for generations was a major accomplishment.
Bob’s Take
This book was about 200 pages, a tiny tome for Bob in the Basement. It was meticulously researched. One minor quibble is that there was almost too much primary source material quoted without a lot of context through the words of people who experienced the project. This makes sense in that by the time the author began working on the book, very few people were still around who had lived through the construction.
James Michael Curley was a classic rogue. Once the Quabbin Commission announced that 5,000 jobs were up for grabs, Governor Curley saw his opportunity and took it. He managed to place his cronies in about half of those good jobs at good wages. It must have been quite the sight to see waves of young men from Greater Boston partying hearty in bucolic western Massachusetts, drinking heavily, chasing women, and raising hell.
On time and under budget. The project was completed in the twelve years set out in the plan and it came in at a cost of $52 million, $13 million less than had been budgeted. There certainty was inefficiency, including lots of political hacks being given make-work jobs, but the bottom line was a very successful undertaking.
Compare that to The Big Dig, officially known as the Central Artery Project (1992 to 2007). The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in US history, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests and the death of one motorist. It was supposed to be done in seven years. It took sixteen years to finish. It was supposed to cost $2.8 billion. The final official tally was $8 billion, but the Boston Globe estimated that the venture will end up costing $22 billion, including interest that will not be paid off for a dozen years.
The future of water will be interesting. Back in January of 2021, I summarized Metropolis, by Ben Wilson, a big book about the growth of cities over the centuries. One of the author’s observations was that population centers develop around sources of water - you build cities where there is plentiful water. The Massachusetts state government chose to destroy four towns to give Greater Boston the water it needed to prosper. Some futurists believe that future wars are as likely to be fought over water as anything else. We shall see.
It was the right thing to do. There really was no other solution to the problem of finding enough water for eastern Massachusetts to grow. It was a brutal thing to do for the people of the four towns but it made sense for the other 99.9% of the state. Something like this massive property grab could never be done today. The environmental regulations alone would be enough to kill it.
Western Massachusetts gets no water from Quabbin. All of the reservoir contents go to 51 cities and towns in the Greater Boston area.
Author Rosenberg provides an apt summary:
“The story of Quabbin is a parable of everything that has gone, and continues to go wrong - and sometimes right - with American public works planning. The Quabbin was both a triumph of engineering and a fear of forward-looking environmental stewardship, yet the most vulnerable humans were disregarded in the process.”
