At the close of the nineteenth century, the valley of the Nashua River in central Massachusetts held four towns living on borrowed time. The houses, churches, mills, and graveyards still stood, but everyone in that valley understood that the water was coming for them. Thirty-five miles to the east, Boston was growing faster than its wells and ponds could ever satisfy, and the state had made a hard, irreversible decision. It would dam the Nashua River, flood the valley, drown the four towns, and, by the hands of thousands of immigrant laborers, build the largest dam of its kind on Earth.
When the work finished in 1905, more than 4,000 acres of that valley lay under water, and more than 4,000 of its dead had been dug up from their graves and carried away to make room for the flood. Boston’s thirst had driven the city outward again and again throughout the nineteenth century. Its engineers dammed ponds and rivers, piping water in from ever greater distances, and each time the swelling city outgrew the supply almost as soon as it was built. A reservoir at Lake Cochituate was celebrated as a permanent solution, but a generation later it was exhausted.
The Sudbury River was tapped next, and still the city drank it dry. By the end of the century, the engineers understood that half measures were finished. Boston needed an enormous new source, a reservoir bigger than anything yet built in America. The man trusted to design it was Frederick Stearns, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Water Board, one of the finest waterworks engineers in the country.
His skill was so respected that he would later be called to the board of consulting engineers for the Panama Canal. When Stearns and his board studied the map for a place large enough, their eyes fell on the broad Nashua Valley, and the fate of the four towns was sealed. The plan called for a great dam across the Nashua at the town of Clinton. Behind it, the river would back up and spread across the whole valley, forming a vast artificial lake.
From there, the water would run downhill by gravity alone through a 35-mile aqueduct to the taps of Boston. It was a machine the size of a landscape, and building it meant deliberately erasing an inhabited piece of country from the map. Four towns lay in the path of the rising water: Boylston, West Boylston, Clinton, and Sterling. West Boylston was hit hardest of all, its very heart doomed to vanish beneath the reservoir.
The state took the land by eminent domain, buying or condemning houses, farms, shops, and factories, and emptying them one by one. Families who had farmed the same ground for four and five generations were told to name their price and leave. Some fought the takings in court and lost. Some moved to new houses on higher ground above the coming waterline, where a shrunken West Boylston was rebuilt, and people could look down from their front porches onto the rising lake that covered their old ones.
In the last months, the doomed buildings were pulled down or burned, the trees were cut, and the cellar holes were left open to the sky. The lived-in valley was scraped down to a bare brown basin, made ready to be filled. Then there were the dead. In the path of the water lay the valley’s cemeteries, and the water could not be allowed to cover the graves.
More than 4,000 bodies had to be dug up from a single local Catholic cemetery alone, carried away, and buried again on higher ground so the reservoir could rise over their empty graves. Grave by grave, the coffins were opened, and where the wood had rotted away the remains were gathered up as tenderly as could be managed and carried to new cemeteries laid out on higher ground. Families stood by and watched their grandparents, wives, and children lifted from the earth where they had been laid to rest and moved to strange new plots, all so a lake could rise where the old churchyard had stood. What the men built at Clinton was a granite gravity dam that rose 205 feet from its foundation, a cliff of dressed stone thrown across the river.
A gravity dam holds back water by sheer brute weight. It is so massive that the pressure of the lake behind it cannot push it, slide it, or tip it over. To build such a thing, the workers had to assemble by hand one of the heaviest single objects human beings have ever made. The stone came from quarries opened nearby.
Quarrymen drilled and split the granite loose in rough blocks; stone cutters dressed and squared them; teams and derricks lifted and carried them to the growing wall; and masons set each block into its exact place, bedding it in mortar so the whole enormous structure would behave as a single solid mass. In cross-section, the dam was a great triangle, thin at the top and swelling to immense thickness at its base, where the full pressure of the deep reservoir would bear against it. Over the top ran a spillway, a broad lip of stone over which the full reservoir could pour without ever overtopping and endangering the dam. When it was completed in 1905, the Wachusett Dam was the largest gravity dam in the world, and the reservoir it created was the largest public water supply reservoir anywhere on Earth.
Larger dams have been built since, with all the machinery of the modern age, but the Wachusett is still said to hold one title to this day: the largest dam ever built by hand. The men who built it were, in the main, immigrants. Thousands of them, many of them Italians from the vast wave of Italian immigration then washing into America, came to central Massachusetts for years of steady work. They built shanty settlements and boarding houses around the site and went down into the quarries and up onto the dam.
They were not welcomed. The established towns regarded thousands of poor Catholic laborers with open suspicion and prejudice. The town of Clinton, fearing disorder, went so far as to ban the sale of alcohol entirely for two full years. The men building the region’s most important public work were treated as a problem to be managed.
Those men were not passive, however. The Italian workers organized and went on strike, and they won. Through collective action, they secured a stable, guaranteed wage of a dollar and fifty cents a day, paid reliably every week, and they won an easing of the rule that had forced them to live crowded at the construction site. Immigrant men, looked down upon and unwanted, stood together and insisted on their own dignity and fair pay, and they prevailed.
The cost of the work was also counted in bodies. Heavy construction in that era killed men with grim regularity. Men were crushed, men fell, and men were carried off maimed or dead, and the careful tally of them was never really kept. For nearly a decade, from 1897 to 1905, a small city’s worth of men labored in that valley through summer heat and winter cold, quarrying, cutting, hauling, and setting granite block by block.
A child born in the valley when the first ground was broken would have been most of the way through grammar school by the time the last stone was set. A wall alone was not the whole of it, for the water still had to travel 35 miles to reach Boston. Alongside the dam, the builders drove a great aqueduct across the countryside, tunneling through hills and bridging valleys. A covered conduit of masonry ran down the long, gentle grade from the reservoir toward the city, laid at exactly the right shallow slope the entire way so that the water could flow to Boston under the pull of gravity alone, without a single pump.
Men dug and lined those tunnels by hand as well, another small army of laborers working underground so the city’s water would arrive by the patient force of water seeking its own level. When the dam was done and the aqueduct was ready, the gates were closed, and the Nashua River began to back up behind the great stone wall. Through 1905 and beyond, the water rose, spreading out across the emptied fields and the abandoned cellar holes and the silent streets, until around 1908 the reservoir had filled and the valley of the four towns was gone. The water crept higher up the bare hillsides each season, swallowing the low ground, then the cellar holes, then the lines of the vanished streets, until only the tops of the surrounding hills stood above the surface as the shores of a new lake.
Down beneath it, the valley remained, changed but not truly gone. To this day, when the reservoir is drawn low in a dry year, the bones of the old towns reappear along its margins: a stone wall running down into the water, the square outline of a vanished foundation, an old road that leads to the edge and then simply continues down into the reservoir toward a town that is no longer there. The Wachusett Reservoir and its great hand-built dam have done exactly the job they were built to do for more than a century. Together with the even larger Quabbin Reservoir, built later to the west, it still forms a central part of the water supply of metropolitan Boston, sending clean water east by gravity to the taps of some two and a half million people.
Every time someone in Boston fills a glass of water, there is a fair chance it came sliding down out of that valley in the west, past stone that immigrant men stacked by hand more than a hundred years ago. The men who built it are all long dead. The towns it drowned are three generations gone. The mules, the derricks, and the stone cutters’ shanties have vanished utterly from the earth.
And yet the thing those men made still works. It still holds back its inland sea, still sends the water east, still keeps a great modern city alive. A Boston newspaper noted not long ago that the largest dam ever built by hand, a 205-foot cliff of granite, sits only an hour from one of the great cities of the country, its top open for people to walk across, and hardly anyone ever goes to see it. It is not a famous place.
There are no crowds. It is simply there, doing its silent work as it has for over a hundred years, a masterpiece that the people it serves have almost entirely forgotten.
