WENDELL — Longtime Quabbin educator and photographer Dale Monette will lead the program “Quabbin: Then and Now” at Wendell Free Library, 7 Wendell Depot Road, tonight at 7 p.m. The “lost” towns and the water source that replaced them will be the subject. Monette’s before and after photographs will be on display.
Monette took state Department of Conservation and Recreation images shot in the 1930s from the Quabbin Reservoir archives and then took his own of the same spots for the displays.
This will give the public the opportunity to see how houses and scenes looked before and during construction of the reservoir, and how those areas look now, some 80 years later. Many of the older images have never been seen by the public.
Monette specializes in nature photography, wildlife and landscapes. He was born and raised in Athol and since the early 1970s has lived within two miles of the Quabbin Reservoir, where he finds many of his subjects. An avid birder since his youth, Monette has hiked and fished at the Quabbin for years. During the 1980s, he was involved in the successful efforts to bring back the common loons and bald eagles as nesting species to the Quabbin watershed.
For more information about Monette and his photography, visit: www.northquabbinphotography.com.