Flashes of Panic

I’m developing a taste for an odd sub-branch of non-fiction: industrial disaster histories. Yesterday I finished In the Shadow of the Dam, Elizabeth Sharpe’s book about the collapse of the Williamsburg reservoir and subsequent disastrous flood in the Mill River valley. The dam and its reservoir were created (along with two still-extant dams on the West Branch of the Mill River, in Goshen) to provide a more constant supply of water to the many water-powered mills and factories in the villages downstream.

I’ve mentioned this flood before, in the context of a drive up Route 9 to ski at Notchview, but when I was training for a marathon in 2002 nearly all of my long runs were done in and around the Mill River valley; most of my runs of sixteen miles or longer would include sections in Florence, Leeds, Haydenville, or Williamsburg. I know the sites of each of the memorials placed for the victims of the flood (starting in 1999, an amazing 125 years afterward,) and I know the villages themselves pretty well.

What I didn’t understand until I read the book was how much the flood changed them. It’s one thing to imagine rising water flooding a town and sweeping away things not anchored down; it’s another to consider the water tumbling, rather than flowing, down the valley, carrying an immense amount of wreckage and scouring the stream bed (and many sections which weren’t stream) down to bedrock. Some mills weren’t rebuilt because their sites simply didn’t exist anymore; the entire village of Skinnerville, between Williamsburg village and Haydenville, essentially ceased to exist.

As a result of this, it’s not really easy to stand in downtown Haydenville, for example, and imagine how the flood changed things; you can just find the places where the flood didn’t reach, and the places where everything has been built since 1874.

So the closing images are among the most striking ones, where Sharpe tells what it’s like to drive up the river valley today. She mentions the acres and acres of debris spread on the meadows between Leeds and Florence, and how, in the 1970s, a large piece of machinery began working to the surface on a fairway of what is now the Northampton Country Club; it was from one of the upstream mills, but a century later, nobody could tell which one.

Probably the most famous building involved in the flood is open to the public. The Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke includes details about how the house was renovated in its lifetime, and how the city acquired it for the museum; it doesn’t mention that the house originally stood in Skinnerville. His factories swept away by the flood (and a foot of muck deposited on the ground floor of his house,) factory owner (and stockholder in the company which built the Williamsburg dam) William Skinner relocated his family and his business to Holyoke. He also had his house carted there, where it stands on a hill, well clear of trouble should the immense Holyoke dam go the way of the Williamsburg reservoir.

Now Playing: You Dreamer from Why The Long Face by Big Country

Technorati Tags: Books, dam, flood, massachusetts, williamsburg