Growing up in Amherst, Emma June Ayres was fascinated by the history of the Quabbin Reservoir – how four towns were disincorporated, razed and flooded, leaving thousands of people displaced during the Great Depression to provide 412 billion gallons of drinking water to the greater Boston area.
Ayres, now a musician, playwright and director, is working on a folk opera about the Quabbin. She was first inspired by the history of the four towns while participating in a summer theater program during her childhood hosted by Village Theatre Company based in West Newbury.
“During that time we created a musical based on Jane Yolen’s book ‘Letting Swift River Go,’ ” said Ayres. The book, written from the perspective of a 10-year-old girl, takes readers through the experience — first the rumors, followed by the decimation of whole towns. Years later, the girl returns to the site of her former home and finds it underwater. “I think that really struck me as a child,” Ayres explained.
Before the flooding of the Swift River Valley, the four towns — Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott — each had their own rich histories. There were grocery stores, apple orchards, historical landmarks, butcher shops, ice cream stands, hundreds of acres of farmland and trains running every day to Springfield and Athol.
But that all changed starting in the 1920s. Bulldozers brought in by the state started demolishing the towns building by building to make way for the reservoir. Over the course of a decade, a total of 2,500 residents were displaced, dozens of buildings were demolished, relocated, or burned to the ground and 7,500 graves were moved from cemeteries.
Even the original site of Conkey’s Tavern — where the 1787 Shay’s Rebellion was planned— is now underwater, according to the Pelham Historical Society.
Newspaper headlines from April, 1938 when the four towns were flooded include “Enfield Soon to Become the Atlantis of Massachusetts,” and “Dying Towns Dance and Weep Before Flood.”
At the aforementioned dance — the “Enfield Fireman’s Farewell Ball” held on April 28, 1938 — residents danced their heartaches away while mourning the loss of their hometowns. They danced to “Auld Lang Syne,” and at the stroke of midnight, part of Enfield officially merged with Belchertown.
“I think that these (headlines) really highlight multiple layers of the story, because, first of all, you have the people who were there before the settlers — the Nipmuc people — and then you have the people who then colonized that land … But then you also have these dynamics of the Great Depression.”
Ayres said most people living in the lost towns worked on farms or in factories. “During the Great Depression, there was a lot of poverty and this area was really struck. No one could afford to buy anything that was being made in the factories,” she added.
Learning about the displacement and loss of the towns through that summer theater program planted the seeds for Ayres to write her own works about the Quabbin. Ayres has created two seperate theatrical producations inspired by the former towns.
The first was a 2014 stage version of “The Water Project” with Eggtooth Productions at the former Arts Block building, now Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in Greenfield. The production was subsequently staged at Amherst College and the Double Take Fringe Festival in Greenfield.
After multiple sold-out productions of the play, Ayres organized an immersive live production of the play at in 2017 with TheatreTruck at The Swift River Valley Historical Society in New Salem, which is dedicated to preserving the artifacts, stories and records of the lost towns of the Swift River Valley.
“We took over the old farmhouse and the Prescott Church, which are both on the grounds of the Swift River Valley Historical Society, and the acreage surrounding it. We did this immersive production where the audience got released into the play and they were sort of voyeurs, who got to wander through the story and haphazardly put it together. And then they were funneled into this final scene in this church where they were basically complicit in the decision-making process of flooding the valley,” she explained.
For Ayres, her adolescent interest in the history of the Quabbin continued to resonate with her as an adult, specifically around the themes of displacement, eminent domain, politics, and the incalculable price of drinking water.
Growing up, Ayres often heard urban myths about being able to see a church steeple and the former towns under the waters of the Quabbin. However, she learned the “surreal mythology” and local folklore isn’t factual. Many of the buildings in the four towns were either relocated or burned to the ground.
Ayres has been researching the history of the Quabbin for more than half a decade. A former member of the Swift River Valley Historical Society’s board of directors in New Salem, she has pored over the archival photographs, historical documents and genealogical information available at the society.
She’s exploring all of those layers in a new folk opera adaptation of The Water Project planned for next year. Ayres has recorded a few songs for the folk opera thus far, including an emotionally stirring and haunting folk ballad called “Progress” that sets a tone of loss regarding the flooding of the Swift River Valley.
“There’s a howl in the hills/ a greedy howl in the hills/ star-struck vultures flying low/ salute the town you once called home/ pick the marrow from the bone/ make sure your memories can float,” Ayres sings on the first verse of the song while tremolo guitars and warbling strings create anxiety and tension.
The album itself will draw upon musicians across the Pioneer Valley with multiple singers, instrumentalists and bands contributing to the project in a wide range of styles such as folk, Americana, big band jazz, and grange hall dance music of New England to replicate the sounds of the 1920s and 1930s.
So having created two other productions on the topic, why is Ayres interested in telling a new story about the Quabbin?
“I feel like all of these iterations have been necessary to understand the complicated relationships at play and all the multiple layers of politics and history,” she said, adding that there are parallels between the 1930s and the socio-political landscape in the United States today.
Part of the folk opera will explore the political aspect of the Quabbin. Through her research, she discovered how the reservoir was used as leverage by campaigning politicians: In Boston, it was billed as a protected source for drinking water, and in western Massachusetts, impoverished residents were promised that the project would create jobs. “It was sort of in the service of leaders during a time of need,” she said.
And it didn’t have to be that way. There were three other sites for the Quabbin Reservoir, which wouldn’t have required the destruction of whole towns, she said, which adds to the decades of resentment that people of those towns felt for the city of Boston. “I think that there are all of these nuances to the Quabbin and why it was so dramatic and why all these people were sort of needlessly displaced,” she said.
During a presentation at the Belchertown Senior Center last week, Stanley Boyko, who at 94 is one of the last surviving residents of the former towns, recalled what life was like in Enfield during the 1930s. He said his father was a carpenter and his family lived in a 10-room home; they had 25 acres consisting of 100 apple trees, two dairy cows, chickens, as well as a horse and wagon.
He said he remembers seeing a church in Enfield being burned to the ground. “Jesus Christ must have cried,” Boyko remarked, as a slideshow image showed flames engulfing the steeple of the church.
Boyko said the Quabbin continues to be a source of drinking water to Boston, and that Boston has benefited from the suffering of hundreds of families who were displaced and moved to nearby cities such as Belchertown, Ludlow and Springfield.
Ayres uncovered similar sentiments in her research, interviewing people who “experienced the displacement themselves or are children of the people who experienced that displacement,” she said. “There’s people that up until their dying day refuse to set foot in Boston because they were so angry.”
Dot Frye, administrative assistant at the Swift River Valley Historical Society, said part of the group’s mission is to keep the Quabbin protected due to tremendous sacrifice for the reservoir’s creation.
“Water is the most important currency, and it has been forever,” Ayres said. “But we, who live in a land of plentiful clean water, take it so for granted.”
Chris Goudreau can be reached at cgoudreau@valleyadvocate.com.
For more information about Emma Ayres, visit her Bandcamp page at emmajunemusic.bandcamp.com.