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A visit to one of the towns flooded so we could get clean drinking water
By adamg on Fri, 02/26/2016 - 8:19am
Turns out that only three of the four towns evacuated to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir are mostly submerged under the water. Roadtripnewengland recently visited the ex-town of Dana, which is still mostly above water.
Via Boston Reddit.
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Documentary
There's a really good WGBY (PBS) documentary about these towns and the Quabbin that is definitely worth checking out.
http://video.wgby.org/video/2365046325/
Ah, the Quabbin.
This is very interesting stuff. Thanks for posting.
There are two books that I have which deal with the “disincorporation” of the 4 towns and building of the Quabbin.
One, I think, I simply entitled Quabbin. There is a subtitle, but I have forgotten it and I don’t have the book handy (it might be “accidental wilderness”).
The other, arguably more entertaining, is Stillwater by Bill Weld (yes, as in Gov. William F. Weld). It’s a novel that, if I remember correctly, Weld once described as a fictional account of all the sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll that went down immediately before the flooding of the 4 towns began. It’s not literature, but it’s an entertaining vacation/beach-type read (but not embossed paperback/head of the checkout line silly). I know that it's probably not popular to say on UHub, but I will confess to having enjoyed Weld's 3 novels.
I wrote an article on the Quabbin
https://www3.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/06spring/quabbin/
I wrote this feature article for Amherst College's magazine in 2006. It's one of my first attempts at feature writing (please excuse the bumps), but it goes into detail about the history of the Quabbin and its current status as a critical watershed.
Well done
Excellent story.
I grew up in Hardwick, about
I grew up in Hardwick, about 5 or 6 miles from where those pictures were taken. The Quabbin is such a great place. If you fly over it, you can see all of the cellar holes and stone walls under the water.
I wonder if whoever took those pictures scoped out the site where Popcorn Snow's tomb was.
http://www.westfordcomp.com/quabbin/snow.htm
Just think -
In the future, we can all look forward to a photo expose of the Back Bay, or Seaport - "The submerged city of Boston, flooded so that we could all continue to drive our pickup trucks, SUVs, etc...
Be careful if you visit. I've
Be careful if you visit. I've picked up ticks every time I've walked near the Quabbin.
Why did it have to be snakes?
...what is the reasoning behind reintroducing the timber rattlesnake to Massachusetts?
Because they're indigenous to
Because they're indigenous to the state and in danger of extinction.
http://www.wbur.org/2016/02/24/rattlesnake-fears-quabbin-island
Unless you're indigenous...
...it's the snakes that ought to be asking questions like this about us.
Actually...
Almost all of Prescott was spared submersion too. Prescott Center was on what is now the Prescott Peninsula, which is a portion of Quabbin Reservation that is not open to the public. Greenwich (pronounced green-wich, BTW) and Enfield fared the worst fates of the four towns, having been pretty much completely submerged. Prescott Town House is still standing, it was moved to Petersham (pronounced peters-ham, while we're at it..) shortly after the town was disincorporated.
Good info but
I worked in Worcester for a while and took great pleasure in mispronouncing town names to the natives and watching them get angry. Fish in a barrel.