State’s Shrinking Lakes Bring Flood of Memories : Drought: Townspeople displaced by dam projects return. Some enjoy sights; others find ‘ghosts’ unsettling.

The old town of Kernville was condemned, bulldozed and flooded when a nearby river was dammed and a reservoir was built. Since the early 1950s, the town site has been under water, and the old building foundations, like a freshwater Atlantis, have gathered moss on the lake bottom, catching fishing lines and providing a hiding place for bass.

But as the drought has dragged on, and the level of Lake Isabella in the southern Sierra has continued to drop, this lost city has resurfaced.

Three years ago, the remnants of Kernville were visible beneath the murky waters. The next year, the edge of the town popped out of the mud. And this year it has been so dry that the entire town site is exposed, including the old Main Street, the foundations of a number of 19th-Century buildings, and rock walls and concrete steps from the school and church.

Although the drought has been a tremendous hardship for the state, it has created a rare opportunity for local historians, former residents and visiting tourists. The remains of a number of old communities throughout the state, condemned by the federal government to make room for reservoirs, are visible again as lake levels drop to record lows.

Folsom Lake near Sacramento has receded to the point that the community of Mormon Island, founded in the mid-1800s and flooded in the mid-1900s, has recently emerged. At Lake Berryessa, near Napa, vestiges of the old town of Monticello are visible again.

At other reservoirs, dropping water levels have revealed gold-mining equipment from the 1850s, miners’ mule trails, abandoned railroad tunnels, old swinging bridges, stolen cars stripped and then dumped, and skeletons of people who died in boating accidents.

But it is the old communities that attract the most interest. People who once lived there want to return for another look. Local historians sift through the rubble for clues to the past. And camera-toting tourists hike over dry lake bottoms and snap pictures of 100-year-old streets and foundations that one day may be covered with water again.

Since Kernville--about 50 miles northeast of Bakersfield--has resurfaced, the local historical society has passed out hundreds of old maps of the town, led tours and posted hand-lettered signs identifying streets and prominent buildings.

There are no structures left standing in the town, only sections of rock walls, scattered stone foundations, concrete steps leading to nowhere, and the faint grid pattern of streets. The site is covered with sand, dry thistle and freshwater clam shells.

But those who once lived there are grateful for the opportunity to study the few fragments that remain. Bob Powers, 66, who was born in Kernville, walked through the old streets, now just patches of asphalt, and stopped before the remains of the Methodist Church, built in 1898.

“My wife and I were married in this church,” he said. He walked to a corner of the concrete foundation. “This is where the Sunday school was.” He took a few steps to the front of the church. “I gave a sermon here . . . in about 1946.”

Powers walked across the dry lake bottom, toward the old Main Street. Dusty, brown hillsides, bearing high-water marks from long ago, rise up around the lake, which has dropped more than 50 feet.

“This was a beautiful town, with tall cottonwood trees along the streets and the river running by.” He paused and studied a patch of asphalt. “That was a long time ago.”

Intermingled with the relics of the old town is the random detritus of the modern era. Faded beer cans, bottles of tanning lotion, sunglasses and plastic foam cups are also found scattered along the sands of the lake bed.

Kernville, founded in 1860 by gold miners, had about 300 residents when it was condemned by the federal government in the late 1940s. Merchants, who served many of the large cattle ranchers and timber companies, were reluctant to leave the valley, said Powers, who has written a history of the town. Many, like Powers, were fifth-generation residents and could not conceive of living anywhere else.

So a number of residents chipped in, bought a ranch a few miles up the Kern River, laid out the streets and created a new Kernville, now a thriving community of about 2,000. A number of the old buildings were moved to the new site, and many of the residents were able to reopen businesses.

But most communities displaced by reservoirs had a less happy fate. In California, the federal government built 30 large dams between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s, and the majority of the scenic river valley communities that were condemned never were reestablished.

The dams were needed to provide water for the state’s burgeoning population and the expanding agricultural industry, said Phil Benge, a planner for the Army Corps of Engineers. And because most of the condemned towns were remote, rural communities, they did not have the political power to challenge the government.

But the residents of Monticello tried. In the 1940s, when the government announced that it was going to condemn Monticello and build a dam and reservoir, residents sent a delegation of local politicians to Washington and implored the governor to intervene and save the town.

“We were just a bunch of farmers and small-town businessmen,” said Bob McKenzie, 70. “We didn’t have enough clout.”

McKenzie, like many young soldiers after World War II, had returned home to Monticello to discover that the small town was doomed. He had planned to take over his father’s general store, but suddenly, he said, he had to find another job and another home.

McKenzie moved to Napa, found work as a newspaper photographer and thought he had seen the last of Monticello. But the drought has been so severe for Lake Berryessa that it has shrunk from 26 miles long to 18 miles, and vestiges of the old town have emerged.

A concrete bridge, built in 1941, appeared last summer. The 80-foot bridge has become a tourist attraction, and dozens of people a day walk down boat ramps, now hundreds of feet from shore, and hike across the dry, cracked lake bed to the bridge.

On the eastern shore of the lake, the old Monticello Road, its yellow center line still intact, has surfaced. A blue-tiled swimming pool behind an old ranch house--where McKenzie swam as a child--and the foundation of a large grain silo have also emerged from the lake bottom.

Returning to Monticello brings back bittersweet memories for McKenzie that he calls “ghosts in my head.”

He has fond boyhood recollections, but he still is disturbed that the town and the fertile Berryessa Valley were destroyed. Water was needed, he acknowledged, but several smaller dams could have been built upriver, and the town of Monticello could have been saved.

But property owners were simply paid off by the government, he said, and buildings were either bulldozed or cables were tied around them and they were pulled down. The piles of rubble were then burned. Trees were cut down, six inches from the ground. The town’s 100-year-old graveyard was moved to higher ground.

While the outskirts of Monticello are now visible, the small downtown is still 50 feet underwater. But few former residents, McKenzie said, are eager to see it again.

“The emergence of all these foundations and bridges is just a graphic indication of how serious this drought is,” McKenzie said. “It’s been interesting visiting the area again, but it doesn’t bring us much joy. What we want is rain.”

At Folsom Lake, which has dropped almost 100 feet in the last few years, Artie Davies now can visit the site of her old dairy farm. On a recent afternoon she walked along the property and discovered remains that had been under water for 40 years: a large well, a rock wall from her winery, the stumps of two palm trees from her front yard, the foundation of a dairy barn and the troughs where the cattle drank.

Davies, 77, sifted through the rubble that once was the parlor of her Victorian house, razed in 1951. She found a fork, a shard of green pottery, a piece of wooden molding with chipped white paint.

She had lived in Mormon Island, a small ranching and farming community near the banks of the American River, until the federal government forced the residents out so it could build Folsom Dam and Folsom Lake. They paid her family $40,000 for their dairy ranch. Davies’ husband used most of the money to buy equipment for a grain farm. But it rained too much that year, the crop washed out and they lost their investment. They ended up moving to a small house in nearby Folsom.

About 20 other ranching families had lived in Mormon Island, founded in the mid-1800s, when a group of Mormons split off from Brigham Young to join the gold rush. In addition to the Davies house, a number of other signs of the old community have surfaced. At the cemetery, the remains of several crypts have recently emerged, and the names engraved in the stone are still visible.

A few miles north lies the foundation of the elementary school Davies attended in the 1920s. Nearby is a retaining wall, built during the Gold Rush to keep mining machines from spraying rocks onto the roadway. A serpentine canal, which once irrigated gold-mining operations and orchards, still stretches for miles along the reservoir bottom.

Davies wandered along the edge of the canal and recalled how her daughter learned to swim here. She has enjoyed returning to the area, she said, because it brings back memories of the idyllic days when her young family lived on their 200-acre ranch beside the river. She likes to recall how, in the springtime, the valley was covered with bluebells, white forget-me-nots and cream-colored lilies, how her children used to enjoy wandering through the pine and oak trees on the hillsides.

“Sometime I get a certain sadness when I return,” said Davies, clutching the fork, pottery and other mementos from a past life. “But mostly I have pleasant memories . . . and have a longing for that life again.”