In the Shadow of the Dam: The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874
304
In the Shadow of the Dam: The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874
304Paperback
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Overview
In this compelling tale of a man-made disaster peopled with everyday heroes and arrogant scoundrels, Elizabeth Sharpe opens a rare window into industry and village life in nineteenth-century New England, a time when dam failures and other industrial accidents were widespread and laws favored factory owners rather than factory workers. In the Mill Valley, the townsfolk depended upon generally benevolent patriarchs who assured them that the dam was safe, when most people could see that it was not.
The story of the Mill River flood is the story of those townsfolk: of George Cheney, the dam keeper whose repeated warnings about leaks in the dam had been ignored by the mill owners; of his wife, Elizabeth, who watched in disbelief as the dam burst open from the bottom; of Isabell Hayden, the mother who saw her young son swept away in the river's torrent; and of Fred Howard, a box maker who spent the days after the flood searching for bodies, burying friends, and waiting to see if the button factory he relied upon for his livelihood would be rebuilt. It is also the story of the well-meaning but overconfident businessmen who built the dam: of Onslow Spelman, the manufacturer who dismissed the dam keeper's flood warning, irrationally insisting that the dam could not break; of Lucius Fenn and Joel Bassett, the engineer and contractor whose roles in the construction of the dam would be questioned during the public inquest into the causes of the flood; of William Skinner, the factory owner who struggled to decide whether or not to rebuild his silk factory in the village that bore his name; and of many others.
The flood highlighted class divisions between worker and owner, as well as the disorganized state of professional engineering, then still in its infancy. As the flood exposed the dangers of allowing mill owners — who were not trained engineers — to design their own dam, legislation to regulate the building of reservoir dams in Massachusetts was enacted for the first time. Engineers, politicians, and business owners battled over control of the reform measures to prevent similar tragedies, yet saw them continually repeated.
In the Shadow of the Dam is the story of an event that reshaped a society. Told through the eyes of villagers like Collins Graves, lauded as a hero for his desperate ride through the valley to warn people of the impending flood, and industrialists like Joel Hayden Jr., entrusted with the responsibility of disaster relief despite his culpability in failing to maintain the leaking dam, In the Shadow of the Dam is a history of our uneasy relationship with industrial progress and a riveting narrative of a tragic disaster in small-town Massachusetts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781416572640 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Free Press |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2007 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 531,886 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In the Shadow of the Dam
The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874By Elizabeth M. Sharpe
Free Press
Copyright © 2004 Elizabeth M. SharpeAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0743223578
PROLOGUE
On the last day of the coroner's inquest into the cause of the Mill River flood deaths, Joel Hayden Jr. was the morning's first witness. Two weeks earlier, on May 16, 1874, three of his factories had been destroyed when the Williamsburg reservoir dam broke, sending an avalanche of water over five factory villages that lined the Mill Valley in western Massachusetts. When the flood reached Haydenville, the mill village his father had built, it picked up a house and slammed it into his brass factory with such force that the three-story brick structure collapsed, ends folding over the middle as though it were a cardboard box. Brass goods, the company safe, and even the granite columns that had framed the entrance to the office building were found hundreds of yards downstream amid heaps of debris so dense and tangled that men used crowbars to pry the items apart. Twenty-seven of the 139 people killed were from Haydenville.
Coroner Ansel Wright offered Hayden the opportunity to make a statement before questioning. He accepted. For the record, he said, he wanted to correct a report by the New York Herald that in earlier times his father had instructed workers to leave the brass factory as soon as they heard the cry "reservoir" in the streets. There was no such warning system, Hayden insisted, because there was no thought that the dam would ever break. Hayden's father, who had died six months earlier, had been partners with his son for more than a decade in the brass and cotton factories. At thirty-nine, Young Joel (as everyone still called him) had grown to look like his father, a successful manufacturer and former Massachusetts lieutenant governor. They shared the same handsome face with finely chiseled features, a long straight nose, thick, wavy gray hair, and a dignified, energetic manner. A Springfield Republican reporter observed that Joel Jr. "reminds one forcibly of his father, who especially in his old age, was a man of rarely fine presence."
Ansel Wright turned the questioning over to Charles Delano, a prominent local attorney and a former U.S. congressman, who had been appointed assistant coroner for the inquest. Delano knew Young Joel from Northampton civic affairs and his father from Republican party politics. As Hayden testified, reporters from the Springfield, Boston, and New York papers scribbled furiously, summarizing the proceedings that they would telegraph to their newspapers, or to a wire service, so that Hayden's testimony could be served up that evening or with tomorrow morning's breakfast. According to the newspaper summaries, their dialogue went like this:
Delano asked: What was your father's opinion of the Williamsburg dam?
Hayden said he had no personal knowledge of what his father thought about the dam.
Delano must have thought that Hayden would hold back. The other mill owners, sitting with their attorney at the front table, watching Young Joel, were all partners in the reservoir company that owned the failed dam. Few had willingly offered any information about the dam. Delano picked up a copy of the Hampshire Gazette, a Northampton newspaper, and read aloud what purported to be Joel Hayden Jr.'s own statement:
Mr. Hayden says that "his father was always in fear of this reservoir dam." He believed it to be weak and dangerous, and "a thousand times" says Mr. Hayden "have I heard him express such fears." It worried him and when there was a heavy rain he could not sleep at night, so great was his apprehension that the dam would break away. Several times I have known him to get up in the night and drive up to the reservoir to examine it, so as to personally satisfy himself that it was all right.
Delano asked, did you talk with Henry Gere, the newspaper's editor, about your father's fear of the Williamsburg dam? Young Joel knew Gere well. Twenty-nine years earlier, in 1845, young Joel's father had begun publishing the Hampshire Herald, the first newspaper in the county to call for the abolition of slavery, and had hired seventeen-year-old Gere as an apprentice printer and later as editor.
Yes, his father had talked to Mr. Gere, but his words were misunderstood. His father in his later years was timid, especially in the springtime with the threat of flash floods. He was concerned about all the reservoir dams, but not the Williamsburg dam more than the others.
Why did he go up to the Williamsburg reservoir?
Hayden supposed that he went for the same reasons he would sometimes go over to the brass works, to make sure it wasn't on fire.
But the brass factory was across the street from your father's home, while the reservoir was five miles up in the hills. It was "no child's play to drive up there in the night," Delano countered.
No, but it was only on rainy nights that he went, and only to see that it was all right. He was old and frightened easily. He didn't think it would ever go off.
How long would he be gone on these trips to the reservoir?
Hayden didn't know. He never personally saw him go to the Williamsburg reservoir at night. He had only heard from family members that he had gone about a dozen times.
Did your father ever go to one of the Goshen reservoirs at night? The reservoir company owned two reservoirs in the town of Goshen, northwest of Williamsburg, on the West Branch of the Mill River, which supplied power to their factories.
No, Young Joel never knew of him doing that and was under the impression that he never did.
Delano and the jurors asked no more questions. "He [Hayden] gave his testimony with reluctance," the Springfield Republican reported.
When Joel Hayden Jr. stepped down, his future was uncertain. The day after the flood he had posted notices promising to rebuild the brass works in the same location in Haydenville. Thrilled, his employees eagerly took jobs with him digging the riverbed with picks and shovels to uncover manufacturing patterns and finished brass goods washed out of the factory. Their wives and children followed behind scooping up the salvage, finding some still packed in their original boxes. But a week after the flood, business leaders from larger manufacturing centers like Chicopee and Holyoke on the Connecticut River, and Norwich, Connecticut, on the Thames River, offered Hayden vast quantities of cheap waterpower from their large rivers to entice him to move his business. If Hayden had changed his mind about rebuilding his father's village, he hadn't made any announcements yet. His employees fished bricks out of the mud to use in building the new factory, and waited.
Copyright © 2004 by Elizabeth M. Sharpe
Continues...
Excerpted from In the Shadow of the Dam by Elizabeth M. Sharpe Copyright © 2004 by Elizabeth M. Sharpe. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| Prologue | 1 | |
| Chapter 1 | The Mill Valley | 5 |
| Chapter 2 | Building the Williamsburg Dam | 34 |
| Chapter 3 | The Flood | 50 |
| Chapter 4 | The Aftermath | 90 |
| Chapter 5 | Rebuilding | 124 |
| Chapter 6 | The Inquest | 152 |
| Chapter 7 | The Verdict | 182 |
| Chapter 8 | Change | 205 |
| Epilogue | 227 | |
| Appendix A | Contract and Specifications for the Williamsburg Dam | 233 |
| Appendix B | List of Flood Victims | 236 |
| Appendix C | Verdict of the Coroner's Inquest | 240 |
| Notes | 245 | |
| Bibliography | 259 | |
| Index | 273 |