Masonry Dam & Rattlesnake Lake ~ Moncton, WA

Beginning in May 1915, the community of Moncton, located along the northern shore of Rattlesnake Lake, experiences one of the slowest floods in King County history. Throughout the summer, the lake is fed by seepage from an upstream dam, causing it to slowly rise. By the end of the year, Rattlesnake Lake inundated the town, which was later condemned.

Not There Long

In 1906, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway was built through the Cedar River watershed to provide access for the water department workers and their families who lived in nearby Cedar Falls. In a short time, a new community was built on the rail line a half mile north of the generating station at Cedar Falls. Located along the shores of Rattlesnake Lake, the new village was named for one of its settlers, a Mr. Moncton.

Whereas the Seattle Water Department owned worker homes in Cedar Falls, private individuals owned most of the houses at Moncton. The idyllic setting along the lake was ideal for many water, logging, and rail workers who wanted to own their own property. By 1912, Moncton “absorbed” the name Cedar Falls, due in part to urging from Seattle Water Department Assistant Engineer, J. D. Ross, but many who lived there continued to call it Moncton.

Pott's Hotel

By 1915, more than 200 people lived in Moncton, and the fledgling community had a hotel, a barbershop, a saloon, a restaurant, a few stores, and even an indoor swimming pool. A school on the north end of town provided education for children up through 8th grade. Older students had to walk or ride a horse seven miles to the nearest high school in North Bend.

Springs in the Springtime

At the turn of the 20th century, Seattle was a quickly growing city in the wilderness of the Northwest. Between 1900 and 1910, the population of the city more than doubled, causing the city to have an infrastructure problem. The city needed power and needed it quickly.

In 1914, the Seattle began building a masonry dam on the Cedar River between Cedar Lake and Rattlesnake Lake. The dam was needed to impound water to generate electric power for City Light. In a rush to build the dam, the city seemed to have skipped a few basic engineering studies that would have warned them of future problems with the dam. Chief among these were that they were building a dam on top of a glacial moraine. That is to say, they were building on gravel and sand. (Ref. Journal of Electricity, Power and Gas, Vol 34, No. 21, May 22, 1915.)

By the spring of 1915, the pool behind the dam that would later become Chester Morse Lake, began to fill up. Throughout the clear-cut hillsides that rainy season, nearby residents started noticing springs erupting out of the ground. As the lake rose, springs turned into geysers. Leakage was so bad that the lake behind the dam started to lose water faster than it could fill up. The water was dropping as much as an inch an hour of 4.2 million cubic feet a day.

This is when the city noticed they had a problem on their hands. According to an article written a few years later the incident, "While the dam was on a rock foundation, that foundation was plainly but a spur of rock."

As more water filled the pool, and more rain fell from the skies, more pressure caused more mini-geysers to erupt in the hills above Moncton. The excess water in the moraine had nowhere to flow but into Rattlesnake Lake. Slowly the lake began to rise. First, the water edged up to the homes nearest the shoreline. A few days later, the streets muddied, and after that, standing water filled the lower section of town. At first, residents may have hoped that the slow-motion flood would somehow be diverted elsewhere, but it soon became apparent that their community would be underwater by summer’s end.

The Creeping Flood

During the month of May, the water rose a little over a foot per day. Rowboats and a barge were floated in so furnishings and personal items could be removed. After that the levels kept increasing to the point where houses popped off their foundations, causing them to float like corks into the middle of the lake.

Moncton residents kept a stiff upper lip and hoped for the best. Although many were now homeless, those who worked for the water department or the railroad were sheltered in tents while new homes were built for them. Others were out of luck.

The school, located on higher ground, was still in use, but a storm ripped its roof off, and classes were moved to a church on the south end of the lake. By the time Rattlesnake Lake stopped rising, the buildings on the south end were the only ones spared.

Moncton, We Hardly Knew Ye

Worried that the wreckage-strewn lake would next seep into the watershed, the City of Seattle condemned the town of Moncton. A total of $47,658.03 was paid to residents for their land. The next year, water levels receded enough for Seattle City Light to finish off the town.

A crew of workers was sent in to tear down the waterlogged homes. A few were salvageable and were bought by nearby residents and moved to higher ground. The rest were torn apart, soaked in kerosene and lit afire. What water couldn’t destroy, flames quickly erased. For a long time afterwards, Cedar Falls residents were not allowed to swim in the lake for fear of further contamination of the water supply.

Years later it was discovered that the moraine had filtered out impurities. The lake was once again opened to the public. In 1970, Rattlesnake Lake Park was created, and the lake is now used for boating, fishing, and swimming.

Today, little trace of Moncton remains, except for the adventurous. Those with scuba gear can probe the murky depths of Rattlesnake Lake and still find the foundations of this short-lived town.

Neversink Reservoir ~ Neversink, NY

Old Neversink (once called Neversink Flats) was formed from Rochester on March 16, 1798. The original act shows that the town covered a portion of what is now Fallsburgh, Liberty, Callicoon and Fremont.

Neversink (whose fateful name is said to be derived from the Indian word ne-wa-sink, meaning continuously flowing) was the larger of two communities that were removed from the reservoir site in 1942. The other town was called Bittersweet.

The population in 1870 was 2,458. During the year ending Sept. 30, 1871, it contained 20 school districts, in which 19 teachers were employed. The number of children of school age was 1,035; the number attending school, 842.

A total of 340 people were evicted from the valley and 6,149 acres condemned. Some buildings were relocated to nearby towns, though most were bulldozed and burned in a “final harvest.” Trees were removed, cellars were filled in, privies disinfected and even barnyard manure was said to have been dug up, to maintain New York City’s reputation for having the finest quality drinking water possible.

The Neversink Reservoir began to flood the land on June 4, 1953, and took two years to fill.

Pepacton Reservoir ~ Shavertown, NY

Construction of the Pepacton Reservoir began in 1947 and was completed in 1955. It flooded four communities – Arena, Pepacton, Shavertown and Union Grove – and displaced 974 people. The city acquired more than 13,000 acres, including cemeteries from which 2,371 bodies were removed to be re-interred elsewhere.

Removals from the following cemeteries took place in 1953 and 1954. Arena (old), Arena (new), Cat Hollow, Conklin, Edget, Flynn, J.R. Shaver, K.E. Davis Burying Ground, Shaver, Shavertown, Union Grove and Weaver Buring Ground. Thanks to Edward J. Stanton, ACE Manager, Office of Claims, a compilation of reinternments may be found by clicking HERE.



Beneath Pepacton Waters by Alice H. Jacobson (Book Inscription)

"In memory of the most scenic and enchanting valley along the East Branch of the Delaware river and all who lived there. It once was a very busy valley but now many memories lie forever in repose from the great power of eminent domain under the peaceful waters of the great Pepacton reservoir."

"The reservoir - when filled - is truly very pretty, but the warmth, charm and enchantment of the East Branch of the Delaware river surrounded by the beautiful farms with fertile river flats and the four villages Pepacton, Shavertown, Union Gove and Arena - were truly unique and they should never be forgotten.


I have written only a few of many memories of Shavertown and its three sister villages and the farm where I lived for the first eighteen years of my life which was situated along the East Branch of the Delaware river one mile below Shavertown and some of the events which took place over a period of many years which eventually destroyed the lush green valley and four friendly villages.


Although we can never bring back the beautiful lush green valley it is my most sincere hope that this story will help preserve the memories and if this story should inspire others to write, my efforts would be most worthwhile."

MIDNIGHT MOONLIGHT IN UNION GROVE
by Lloyd Barnhart, West Sand Lake, NY

Moon just ain’t right any more;

Can’t figure where or when it will rise or set.

Used to rise upstream; Set downstream.
Not sure what caused it to change; Maybe it will right itself yet.

Many nights, it just appears…abrupt like.
No slow rise...just suddenly, it’s there!

First noticed this ‘bout 20 years or so after the removals.
I tell ya, Will, everything changed forever back then…’Tain’t fair!

Tonight could be one of those nights when it just appears.
LOOK…There it is, right overhead…the MOON!

Now pay attention, boy, keep your eye on the sky;
Could be some strange goings-on here soon.

BATS!….What?….BATS, goddamn BATS!
And, not just a couple, there’s a whole bunch.

Got a mess of them, apparently attracted to the moonlight.
Watch now for a big old owl to come swooping by, looking for his lunch.

Enough of this, Liza, you’re scaring me.
An owl devouring a flock of bats would be a frightful sight.

Aw, he don’t eat the whole damn bunch;
He’ll pick out a weak or sick one…one that that ain’t quite right.

There, see that one, directly under the moon,
The one moving kinda jerky-like, not smoothly like the rest

If old owl shows up now, that one’s a goner.
Those that are easy to catch, old owl likes best!

SWOOSH!….Like an ominous shadow, owl enters the moon glow.
Bats disperse in all directions, except for that one unable to flee.

Owl slices smoothly through the moonlit sky,
And slams into the cripple that is his meal to be.

But now the owl moves oddly…thrashing about,
As if the bat had quills or at least a bad taste.

He flounders and thrashes right, left and down,
And then suddenly rockets up, moonward, with the greatest of haste.

Watch closely, Will, I have seen this before,
But you, I am sure, will find it an unbelievable site.

You will see a perversion of that beloved tale,
As that owl JUMPS OVER THE MOON on this extraordinary night.

I’m glad you’re here with me, Liza; Without you, I’d be scared.
Was it the others leaving, and what happened after, that caused all this?

Like I said, Will, everything changed back then;
Changed forever, and life as we knew it, we now miss.

Liza, it’s DARK: The moon didn’t set….it just went out!
What just happened? What did we see?

Beats the hell out of me, Will;
Beats the hell out of me!

Author's Note:
To provide fresh water for the residents of New York City, a network of upstate reservoirs was created by damming (damning, really) up some of the State's finest rivers. The Pepacton Reservoir was created by a dam across the East Branch of the Delaware River at Downsville. The water, backed up nearly to the village of Margaretville to the east, inundated several nice little country towns/villages. Among those lost forever to Pepacton's waters was Union Grove.

Work on the Pepacton Reservoir began in 1947, with the project completed in 1955. During the years 1953-54, friends and relatives of the deceased orchestrated the removal of remains from a number of cemeteries facing inundation by the soon to be rising reservoir water. Records can be found showing who participated in the removal of whom, along with the relationship shared. Parents removed children ... children removed parents ... friends removed friends ... etc. For two Union Grove decedents, Willie Ackerly, a young boy, and Eliza Lyn Jenkins, a middle-aged woman, the records indicate NO REMOVAL!

Not long after the reservoir was full, 20 years or so later, Pepacton began to give up some really big trout to fishermen from near and far. Many of these big trout are caught on live bait, saw bellies, while fishing at night. The most common approach is to row to a hot spot and then suspend a Coleman lantern, or other bright light, off the side of the boat to attract the saw bellies. It is common for the bait fish to show up at boat side in fairly large schools ... a little like moths drawn to a flame. The bait fish in turn attract the trout. It is, indeed, an awesome sight to see a large brown trout slash through the schooled bait. The fisherman's bait, somewhat crippled by the fish hook in its back is often the target of the hungry trout. Once hooked, the trout puts on a ferocious fight before being unceremoniously hauled up and into the boat.

And that, dear friends, along with years of thought and much imagination, gave birth to MIDNIGHT MOONLIGHT IN UNION GROVE.

As old Paul would say, “Now you have the rest of the story.”

Quabbin Reservoir ~ Enfield, MA

The Quabbin Reservoir is the now the largest body of water in Massachusetts. However, the area it now occupies once had four small towns and a network of roads and rail tracks running through it - all of which were flooded or displaced by the filling of the area with water. While some public structures, memorials and graves were moved out of the way many still sit today at the bottom of this body of water. Some nearby structures sit above the waterline but were abandoned without the adjacent buildings that sustained their use.

Houses were bulldozed, bodies dug up (except for Native Americans), factories demolished and millions acres of trees were cut down. Six towns: Dana, N. Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, Millington and Prescott were inundated by the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir  and seven other towns were altered. A half mile long dam was built on the Swift River in Belchertown MA, and one of the longest tunnels in the world was constructed to carry the water a hundred miles to the east.

Flooding of the valley started in mid August 1939 and in 1946 the reservior was filled to capacity (412 billion gallons). Nearly 40 square miles were covered with water. The new reservoir was named after a Native American chief of a local tribe. The chief's name was Nani-Quaben. The name, which was given to a hill in Enfield and a lake in Greenwich means well watered place.

Taken about 60 years apart
from the same location on
Great Qabbin Mountain:
Top-bottom: 1927, 1939 & 1989

Countless unnamed streams and brooks feed into the reservoir. When you are on the water you can look down and see the ghostly remains of old foundations and stonewalls built many years ago by the long dead inhabitants of the four lost towns. Some people claim that the Quabbin is haunted and if you've ever been within it's borders after dark you'd find yourself hard pressed to argue with them.   

In all 2,500 people were relocated and pproximately 6,500 graves were relocated to Quabbin Park Cemetery which was established for them in 1938. 

The Quabbin finished filling in 1946. It has no flood control, electrical generation or navigation functions. It was built for one purpose only, to serve the drinking water needs of Boston, 60 miles away.

Rondout Reservoir ~ NY

The Rondout Reservoir was made possible by the construction of Merriman Dam along Rondout Creek. Construction began in 1937 and ended in 1954, three years after the reservoir began delivering water. It would be the first of four built by the city to satisfy its growing demand in the years after World War II. Three villages – Lackawack, Montela and Eureka – were condemned and flooded in the process. The small settlement of Grahamsville remains in existence just west of the reservoir.

In 2006, after residents raised concerns regarding the soundness of both Merriman and Neversink dams following emergency repairs to Schoharie Dam, a local newspaper, the Times Herald Record obtained copies of weekly visual inspection reports for both and found that the handwriting and information relating to the appearance of the dams on weekly reports compiled by inspector Ronald Hewlett and initialed by section engineer Russell Betters over a three-year period was virtually identical, suggesting they had been routinely photocopied. The two were later suspended.

Three Affiliated Tribes

Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes
standing on the banks of the Missouri
before the dam was built.

Relations between the U.S. government and the people of Fort Berthold began with a chord of pure harmony. The Mandan lived in villages with the Hidatsa, in lodges walled thick against raiders. “If the Sioux were having a slow day they’d ride up to the villages and plunder and steal horses and kill people,” said Marilyn Hudson, the tribes’ ad hoc historian and the granddaughter of Mandan Chief Cherry Necklace.

“We grew large gardens,” she said. “We had a very organized society which was similar to the white European societies. There were systems of law and order, food distribution. I think it made the people here more compatible with Europeans because they were farmers.”

When the Indian Wars began in the second half of the 1800s, the Mandan and Hidatsa—along with the Arikara, with whom they allied in 1862—signed on as government scouts. They came to be known as the Three Affiliated Tribes and did not have to move to a distant reservation. Rather, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was established more or less on their homeland. Amid a bucolic patchwork of riverside willows, cottonwoods and fields, the people ran small farms, sent their children to school, attended church and took pride in their high level of enlistment in the United States’ armed forces. Women and children cultivated beans, potatoes, carrots and beets, storing them for winter. They canned tomatoes and ate lettuce as it grew in the summer. The men used horse-drawn planters to sow corn and cut hay, which they pitched by hand into hayracks. The families also tended cows, pigs and chickens. “Almost everything grown in the garden was consumed by us and our livestock,” remembered Hudson, 74. “The only thing we bought from the store was sugar, coffee, salt.”

And then, in the mid 1940s, the U.S. government decided it needed a dam.

Of all the variable things in creation,” wrote the editor of the Sioux City Register in 1863, “the most uncertain are the actions of juries, the state of a woman’s mind, and the condition of the Missouri River.” In 1943, the restive Missouri had jumped its banks three times, inundating Iowa and Nebraska and angering precisely the wrong person—Colonel Lewis Pick, the short-fused director of the regional office of the Army Corps of Engineers. “As the floodwaters rose in the streets outside his offices, Pick jumped up on a desk and bellowed at his subordinates: ‘I want to control the Missouri!’ ” wrote Paul VanDevelder in Coyote Warrior, a history of the Garrison Dam and its effect on the tribes.

President Franklin Roosevelt ordered Pick and the Bureau of Reclamation to hammer out a plan. They called for a series of dams on the Upper Missouri—at its center, the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea, which would flood 436 of Fort Berthold’s 531 homes, as well as every square foot of the enviable farmland tilled by the people of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations.

The Indians fought back. But as the news from the government the tribes had trusted for nearly 150 years went from bad to worse, the people of Fort Berthold were stunned, then angry. When now-General Pick appeared at an Elbowoods hearing in 1946, a rancher with a third-grade education and a full-feathered war bonnet named Thomas Spotted Wolf stood up and stuck his finger into the general’s face. “You have come to destroy us!” he shouted, according to his grandson, Jim Bear. “If you look around in our town, we build schools, churches .… we’re becoming civilized! We’re becoming acculturated! Isn’t that what you white people wanted us to do? So we’re doing that! And now you’ll flood our homeland?”

The next year, tribal councilman Mark Mahto told the House Appropriations Committee: “The quickest and most merciful way to exterminate the three tribes is by mass execution, like they did to the Jews in Germany,” recounted VanDevelder in his book, “Everything will be lost if Garrison is built. We will lose our homes, our communities, our economy, our resources.”

But these arguments were no match for the government’s determination to tame the Missouri and spare any ill effects being visited upon its constituent white farmers—who owned less than 10 percent of the land lost to the series of dams the Pick-Sloan Flood Control Act of 1944 installed above Yankton, South Dakota. The rest was all Indian land.



Tribal Chairman George Gillette, front left, weeps
as Interior Secretary Julius Krug signs reservation
lands over to the U.S. Government.

Out of options, the tribes accepted the government’s offer of $5 million in exchange for their homeland. At the signing ceremony on May 20, 1948, in Washington, D.C., the bureaucrats were straight-faced. The suit-clad tribal chairman, George Gillette, stood just to the right of Interior Secretary Julius Krug, crying into his hand.

The Elbowoods Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officers moved their base of operations to the rolling, mostly treeless prairie, to the aptly named hamlet of New Town. Dr. Wilson set up shop on Main Street. Today, North Dakota’s longest bridge stretches nearly a mile across the white-capped water of Lake Sakakawea toward Four Bears Village and an 18-year-old casino—one reason reservation unemployment has dropped from an estimated 80 percent after the flood to about 30 percent today. Fort Berthold is on much firmer economic ground than many other High Plains reservations, although not nearly on par with the rest of North Dakota, which has the country’s lowest unemployment rate, at 3.3 percent. A rich oil field was recently discovered under the reservation, and oil rigs dot the landscape like oversized praying mantises. This has generated much-needed revenue for the tribe, supplemented by the casino and a 1993 settlement for dam-caused damages that provides $8 million to $9 million annually to community programs. Still, for years people have complained that the federal government never made good on its promise to replace the flooded hospital at Elbowoods. And although the oil boom has brought money, it has also brought an increase in traffic deaths, social tension and environmental concerns so profound that some wonder if the reservation will be habitable in 20 years.

“Men are supposed to be the stronger sex, but I don’t think that’s really true,” said Hudson. “When I start thinking about Elbowoods, it seems like it’s the women who were the survivors.”

As the floodwaters covered his house, Thomas Spotted Wolf, who had stood up so angrily to General Pick, sat on a piece of driftwood. “He found a stick and was singing a song, and he had tears coming down,” said his grandson, Jim Bear. “I didn’t have to ask him what was wrong. After that, my grandfather just went downhill. He didn’t have anything to live for any more.”

“Our neighbor to the north, Judge Wolf, would hold court right in his house,” said Hudson. “Everyone respected him—he was very adamant that ‘I love this land I will not leave this land.’ And he didn’t leave. He died. I’m thinking he wasn’t any more than in his 50s.”

After pouring his life into fighting the dam, Hudson’s own father died just a month short of his 58th birthday. Like many others, he left behind a wife who outlived him by decades. “The lake forced us into a cash economy,” said Leo Cummings, the tribal administrator of employment training. “A lot of people lost their lives in downtown New Town, lost their self-esteem, and drank themselves to death.”