Memories Rush Back
When the the four towns that were to disappear beneath the waters of Quabbin Reservoir marked their final hours a half century ago, nearly 11,000 people jammed the two-story brick Enfield Town Hall for a grand finale— the Farewell Ball.
There were two balls that night — April 27, 1938 — not one: a celebration, bittersweet at most, for the young; a sadder, almost tragic event for the older residents residents of the fated Swift River Valley.
For the younger people, it was a great big bash,” recalls 76-year-old Katherine Reed, who now shares an apartment in Orange with her brother, William O’Brien. “For the older people, it wasn’t so funny.”
The anniversary of the Enfield Fire Department’s “Farewell Ball,” which drew an estimated 3,000 people to the town — the largest crowd ever to attend a public function — there will be marked Wednesday night by a “Remembrance Ball” at the Center Auditorium of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
About 350 people are expected to attend the event, now sold out. These include about 25 people who were at the original ball and at least 100 former residents of the towns flooded to make way for metropolitan Boston’s water supply, according to Leslie Campbell of Friends of Quabbin, which helped organize the event.
While they may not make it to the “Remembrance Ball,” Mrs. Reed, Elwyn and Peggy Doubleday of Amherst, and others who attended the final dance in Enfield remember, just the same.
People came from all over,” recalls the curly-gray-haired Reed, beaming at the recollection. “Cars lined both sides of the street. Everyone was just one big happy family.”
At the stroke of midnight, Enfield — as well as the other Swift River Valley towns, Dana, Prescott and Greenwich — were unincorporated, taken over by the state’s Metropolitan District Water Commission.
At that moment, a hush fell over the crowd of about 1,000, according to an account in a newspaper at the time.
“The last note of the clock’s bell had changed a town into a nameless waste, a name into nothing, and what was one of the most beautiful and prosperous towns in the Quabbin Valley became merely a part of an area which was to form a part of the basin of the 18-mile-long Quabbin Reservoir.
“Merrymakers had danced two hours in the Enfield Town Hall until midnight and then found themselves dancing in a building that was no longer a town hall and no longer in Enfield,” the Springfield newspaper account read.
Black-and-white snapshots — some turning brown with age — crowd the coffee table in Reed’s King James Court apartment: She points to her grandparents and parents, shown standing in front of a farmhouse a mile or so outside North Dana where she spent her first 18 years.
In 1930, her grandmother sold to the state the house where the young girl — and her mother before her — had been raised. They resettled in North Dana, a village shown in her pictures as the home of a cloth factory where her father worked, a box factory where two of her brothers and later her husband worked, as well as Doubleday’s and Hager’s general stores and more.
There was also Harvey’s Inn, where she worked from 6 to 6, seven hours a day for three dollars a week as a waitress. There she served meals to the factory workers before those operations, too, moved out of the valley.
“My grandmother wasn’t much to say anything,” recalls Reed. “She was real brokenhearted to have to sell (the house).” For the property, including the 1/4-acre plot, Reed’s grandmother received $1,000.
“They evaluated it and gave you what they wanted,” she said. “When you have to get out (and know) there isn’t going to be any more, for the older people, it was really rough.”
Katherine O’Brien married George Reed in 1934, and they moved into a converted set of hen houses, paying the state $3 a month for rent. Again, she shows a photograph.
“We should’ve got something cheap,” Reed reflects. “They took our homes away from us.”
In fact, cheap rent in the doomed, state-owned houses was a draw for some people in the waning days of the Swift River Valley. With the Depression on, the dying villages provided a home for former urbanites, and land for subsistence farming.
One article in a Springfield newspaper in 1931 beckoned readers, “Visit the Swift River Valley before it is too late. In a few years neither you nor anyone else will be able to see it.” Because of the cheap rents, it continued, “many Springfield and Holyoke families have already found this is a solution for the problem of where to go for the summer.”
High winds fanned forest fires in Montague, Warwick, Orange and Conway on Wednesday, April 27, 1938, as temperatures rose well over 80 degrees. It was the final day for Dana, Enfield, Prescott and neighboring “Green-which.”
The Reeds had gone shopping at the old Exchange Street Market in Athol that day. Many of the stores in the doomed towns had begun to close, forcing the remaining residents to do their shopping in Orange, Ware, Belchertown and other outlying areas.
After returning home in the afternoon, the young couple dressed and went for dinner at the Grange Hall across the street from Enfield’s brick town hall.
Festivities at the town hall included a concert at 8 p.m. featuring the 10-piece McEnelly’s Orchestra, followed by a floor show, and then dancing from 9 to 2 a.m., with “lunch” served at midnight
“Come old timers, new comers and friends of all for a last good time, whether you dance or not,” read the poster, bordered in black.
Come they did.
Outside the town hall, there was a line trying to get inside as well as a crowd of curiosity seekers.
State Police Trooper Arnold Olsson, now 80 and retired in Worcester, was one of three officers from the Northampton barracks assigned to the town hall that night.
He recalls, “It was pretty good crowd. A lot of them were happy, but an awful lot were crying.” The Reeds, who hadn’t bought their $1 tickets in advance, managed to get inside and found the halt draped in black, with red, white and blue banners
Because the crowd exceeded the capacity nearly three times over, the balcony — long since condemned as unsafe — was reopened, and older residents sat there, looking down on the dancers below as they reminisced about the past.
“There were a lot of elderly people who just sat around and talked,” remembers Reed. “There were chairs all around the sides of the hall. When they had the grand march, everyone who could got into it.”
A newspaper account read, “The older residents sat along the walls while the youngsters danced.”
Another reported, “A nervous tension growing throughout the evening had been felt by both present and former residents and casual onlookers. (At the stroke of midnight) the orchestra … faintly sounded the strain of Auld Lang Syne … muffled sounds of sobbing were heard, hardened men were not ashamed to take and kerchiefs.”
Lois Doubleday Barnes of Leverett, now 67, can still recall the graves being disinterred when she was a girl in Greenwich. The digging, which went on day and night for years, was part of the effort to clear the way for the reservoir, the bodies being moved to the large Quabbin Park cemetery in Ware.
“It was one of the weird memories from my childhood,” she says. “I would be walking to catch the bus to school, and the men were digging up bones. It was sort of a daily experience,”
She recalls her parents’ pain at having to move from their farm in Prescott, which her father had bought in 1911.
“It was a very hard thing to move,” she recalls. “These are people whose ancestors had founded the town. To have to leave and have the town no longer exist was terrible.”
Coming back on weekends from Amherst, where she went to college, Barnes would see workers clearing what would become the bottom of the massive reservoir. Trees, the rubble of buildings, brush, all were stacked into huge piles and burned.
“It was a Dante’s inferno,” she re-calls today. “It was a constant burning … day and night.”
Barnes’s twin brother, Elwyn Doubleday, who was a 17-year-old post-graduate student at Belchertown High School at the time, recalls of the ball, “The hall was so jammed ..they tried to let everybody in. It’s a wonder the place didn’t fall down.”
For Doubleday, who had moved with his family from Prescott to Greenwich when he was 10, the ball was just another date with Peg Webster, the Belchertown woman he would marry four years later.
Although it was billed as an informal affair, the Doubledays recalled that some people were dressed in tuxedos and gowns, “like people going to funerals.”
“It seemed like mostly an Enfield affair,” says Doubleday, who had gotten tickets from a friend who lived there. “I just thought another ed in a pastel picture on the wall of the Doubledays’ North Amherst apartment — means more to him, he says, than the Greenwich house from which the family was forced to move In 1938.
“Leaving the valley sort of gave us a new beginning,” he reflects.
“Here was a chance for me to do something else. If we had stayed in Prescott, I’d probably still be raising turnips and milking cows.”
“People didn’t grasp the idea it was really going to happen until the final days, ” Reed says of the flooding that was really going to happen until the final days, Reed says of the flooding that was to come. “It was too late.”
“What people had worked for all their lives, they had to give up and plant new roots ,” she says. “Instead of a valley of towns, it would be a valley of water. For the older people, it was pathetic.
“A lot of people’s feelings ran very deep. They didn’t show it, but they felt it.”
In the last days before the flooding, Reed recalls, the roads were nearly empty, some of the buildings had been torn down and her friends had nearly all gone.
“The longer we lingered,” she says, “the more heartbreaking it was.”
Among the last residents to do so, the Reeds left the valley in August 1938. Within a year, the waters of the Swift River had begun backing up and spreading over the valley’s low areas. Katherine Reed didn’t return until 1980.
Driving to the site of her old North Dana homestead now, she could find the cellar hole’s cement steps where the dump had been.
“It was so good, she says, with a smile. We walked around, we took our shoes and stockings off and paddled our feet. We weren’t supposed to, but we did.” — RICHIE DAVIS