Quabbin Reservoir: The Four Towns Massachusetts Erased

In the early 1900s, Boston was running short of water. Planners looked west, to the Swift River Valley in central Massachusetts, a quiet stretch of farms, mills and villages home to four small towns: Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott. Settlers had lived in the valley since the 1740s. In 1850, about 3,400 people lived in the four towns. The plan was to flood the whole valley. The reservoir was proposed in 1922, and in 1927 the state legislature passed the Swift River Act, making it law. Just the talk of it had already been driving people away. By 1922, the population had dropped to about 2,400. Over the next decade, the valley was taken apart. Property was bought by the state or taken by eminent domain. About 1,100 structures were removed, including roughly 650 homes. More than 31 miles of railroad were torn up, and 242 miles of road were abandoned. Crews nicknamed "woodpeckers" cleared the valley of trees and brush up to 10 feet above the future waterline. The dead had to move too. The state documented and exhumed 7,613 graves from 34 cemeteries across the valley. Most were reburied in a new cemetery built for the purpose, Quabbin Park Cemetery, dedicated in 1933. Its entrance walls were built with stones taken from the four towns. Some families chose to rebury their relatives elsewhere, at the state's expense. The last residents were ordered out in early 1938. On April 28, 1938, the four towns legally ceased to exist. In Enfield, people gathered for a farewell ball in the town hall. The building was later used by the Metropolitan District Commission and was the last building razed in the valley, in 1940. The Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike were finished in 1939, and the water began to rise. It took until 1946 to fill the reservoir. When it was full, the Quabbin held 412 billion gallons of water across 39 square miles, and it's still one of the largest unfiltered water supplies in the United States. Through an aqueduct, its water flows east to the Wachusett Reservoir and on to the Boston area. Not everything vanished. Some of the old town sites are still above water. At Dana Common, people can walk among cellar holes and old foundations to a stone marker that reads "To all those who sacrificed their homes and way of life." The towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott are gone, but parts of them remain in the woods and under the water.