On the morning of May 16, 1874, the dam on the Williamsburg Reservoir, up in the hills along the East Branch of the Mill River, suddenly collapsed, sending 600 million gallons of water roaring downhill.

The flood, which soon became a 30-foot-high brown wall churning with wreckage, dirt, and bodies, cut a deadly swath through some 10 miles of the Mill River valley, from Williamsburg past Florence, destroying buildings, bridges, machinery, trees, livestock and almost anything else in its path.

When it finally subsided after perhaps an hour and a half, 139 people were dead, hundreds of others were left homeless, and factories and mills in four communities had been leveled. In Florence, according to one account, a vast carpet of wreckage, standing three to five feet high, covered rich farmlands.

At the time, it was the worst dam disaster in the country’s history, and it quickly attracted national attention, with journalists, curiosity seekers, and others flocking to the region.

To mark the flood’s 150th anniversary, a group of dedicated area historians, artists, archivists, landscape experts and others have pulled together a wide range of events this month, including historical reenactments, guided walks, community gatherings, and the debut of new music written for the occasion.

Yet the goal in staging these events, planners say, is not just to revisit history but to understand the connections between past and present and to consider how communities respond to tragedy.

“This brings up a new awareness of the land and the river,” said Daria D’Arienzo, an archivist with the Meekins Library in Williamsburg. “This is a piece of the remembered past — it’s part of the everyday discussion of a lot of the people in these communities.”

John Connolly, a Haydenville resident and one of the organizers of the May events, says another impetus for the commemoration was “municipal preparedness” for potential future natural disasters.

He points to the terrible flooding, following heavy rains, in the region last summer that wiped out many farmers’ crops. “This event can focus the attention of local communities on the need to get ready for climate change,” he said.

A “working group” made up of members from several area organizations, including Historic Northampton, the Williamsburg Libraries, the Mill River Greenway Initiative, the Leeds Civic Association (notably artist Heidi Stevens) and staff at Smith College, began meeting about a year ago to begin planning the commemoration of the flood’s anniversary.

They’ve covered a lot of ground, scheduling events in all the communities affected by the disaster and examining that moment through different lenses.

The Meekins Library, for instance, is exhibiting new paintings about the flood by Williamsburg artist Frances Kidder, as well as historically related artwork and poems by Williamsburg elementary school students, a project directed by Amherst artist Nancy Meagher.

Students have used photos of varied objects salvaged after the flood, such as a remarkably undamaged porcelain salt shaker, as models for their artwork.

The anniversary has inspired works of art from further afield, too. Dave Christman, a New York singer-songwriter, has released an original song, “Mill River Flood,” today in honor of the 150th anniversary. He wrote it after visiting the Valley last year and being moved by the story.

“As a kid, my mother used to sing folk songs to us, and the ones that made the biggest impression on me were those with real history behind them, like ‘Jesse James’ and ‘1913 Massacre’ (Woody Guthrie),” Christman said in a press release. He says his song recounts the story of the flood but also “carries a cautionary tale for the ages about the perils of unregulated industrial appetite.”

On the actual May 16 anniversary, a relay of bells from churches stretching from Williamsburg to Northampton will sound in 10-minute intervals between 12:10 and 1:30 p.m., ringing a total of 139 times, once for each flood victim. The event will end with a performance of an original composition in front of First Churches in Northampton by the Smith College Handbell Choir.

Connolly says Steve Calderone, an organist from Our Lady of the Hills Parish in Haydenville, plans to create a video of this “cascade” of bells and post it online.

Community gatherings with multiple events will be held in Williamsburg and Leeds, and a “readers’ theater presentation” takes place at the Hampshire County Courthouse that will revisit a coroner’s inquest, held in Northampton just days after the flood to investigate the cause of the dam’s failure.

Elizabeth Sharpe, co-director of Historic Northampton, says that inquest was covered very closely in the region’s newspapers, and she’s drawn testimony from those accounts to create a back-and-forth narrative that she leads, with help from multiple audience members, who are given scripts to read.

“There are 17 different parts,” said Sharpe. “What emerged from that inquest was all the people responsible for the dam pointing fingers at someone else.”

A familiar story

Indeed, as multiple accounts of the 1874 flood have recorded, the origins of the disaster stemmed from a plot line that became all too familiar in a post-Civil War, rapidly industrializing America: businessmen trying to cut corners, lack of government regulation and oversight, and a legal system full of loopholes and murky laws.

The Williamsburg Reservoir, built in the mid 1860s, was owned and managed by 11 local industrialists who wanted to increase water power for their factories along the Mill River, including a brass works in Haydenville and a silk mill in what was then the hamlet of Skinnerville, located between Williamsburg and Haydenville.

The businessmen balked at the cost a civil engineer proposed for the reservoir — $100,000 — and instead drafted their own design, then hired an inexperienced local engineer to supervise construction of the reservoir and dam.

Sharpe, whose 2004 book “In the Shadow of the Dam” offers a detailed account of the flood, notes that slipshod contractors, also hired on the cheap, made the design worse: The dam leaked for eight years before it finally collapsed, she writes, despite assurances from the manufacturers that the structure was safe.

In the wake of the flood, a strange dynamic emerged. The local industrialists, such as Joel Hayden Sr. and his son Joel Hayden Jr., William Skinner, and William Clement, were respected in their communities, self-made men who lived relatively modestly, residing side by side in town with their workers. Some had been abolitionists before the Civil War; they had helped build schools and churches in their communities.

Yet the shortcuts they took on the dam and reservoir led to the deaths of 139 people, many of them women and children. And the coroner’s inquest, though blaming the business owners in large part for the flood, led to no criminal or civil charges against them.

What was the public attitude to them afterward, then?

“Were they shunned? Not much, I would say,” said Sharpe. “Were they forgiven? I don’t know. Local history pushed down the question of responsibility — memory was lost in some cases. Some older folks say their grandparents and parents didn’t want to talk about it.”

Yet today the story has come back into public light, she and other planners say, leading to new ways to remember the flood and the Mill Valley’s history. Part of the 150th commemoration is the creation of an online, interactive story map, designed and hosted by staff and students at Smith College, that shows the length of the Mill River and the span of the flood.

That project includes the installation of historical markers, with period photos and descriptions of what happened, at 76 sites up and down the river valley; online links provide directions between the markers.

“We want to encourage people to take a day here and there to explore the path of the flood,” said Emma John, museum assistant at Historic Northampton.

Also on tap: a project to plant 144 trees to honor the flood victims and some heroes of that day, from men such as George Cheney and Myron Day who raced downstream on horseback in different parts of the valley to warn people of the flood, to the horses that carried them.

That project will be overseen by Gaby Immerman of the Mill River Greenway, taking place over the next five years and extending from Williamsburg to Northampton.

D’Arienzo, the Meekins Library archivist, notes that many of the local people devastated by the flood ultimately stayed and rebuilt their communities, which still stand 150 years later — and in that sense, she said, “It’s not just a story about a disaster. It’s a story about hope.”

For more information on the upcoming events, including registering for guided tours to the dam ruins, visit historicnorthampton.org.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.