Success of Reservoir Can’t Drown Sorrows of Displaced

The Legislature’s notice was stark: 1,100 people in almost a dozen century-old logging and farming communities in the Adirondack Mountains had to abandon the only homes their families knew.

Their hamlets and villages and crossroads were to be sacrificed to the $12-million Sacandaga River project, a massive dam that would back up a vast lake over 42 square miles in three counties 50 miles northwest of Albany.

Their loss would be part of the Empire State’s contribution to the big ideas and big spending of post-World War I America.

It was the 1920s, when imaginations were tickled by the deeds of Babe Ruth and Henry Ford, when a colossally expensive series of dams curbed the Mississippi River’s worst flooding, when sketches for the Hoover Dam first filled drawing boards.

Then, as now, the new reservoir would protect cities along the Hudson River from floods and provide electricity as far away as New York City, the power-gobbler 200 miles to the south.

Seventy years after the reservoir filled, it still churns turbines. Five hydroelectric plants that depend on the Great Sacandaga Lake were relicensed last summer after five years of negotiations with environmentalists and owners of vacation homes.

The down-river industrialists who first lobbied for the reservoir, including Ford, correctly predicted the lake would be critically important for decades.

But George Wilber was no industrialist.

From the single wooden-plank step of his general store and post office at the four corners of little Osborn Bridge, he could see all the business he needed: across the street, W. E. Flynn’s Blacksmith Shop and a red schoolhouse for 20 students; around the corner, the community church.

All of it was surrounded by rows of small houses, most built by the owners’ grandparents, the first white settlers.

Wilber planned to work out his years in his own business surrounded by and helping out his neighbors.

Instead, in his early 60s, he surrendered the prestige of postmaster and proprietor of the town’s only general store to start over as a subsistence farmer on rocky, unfamiliar land.

His older daughter, Ethel, was 32. She had already moved from Osborn Bridge, first to college, then to teach. But her hometown never left her.

“It will soon be as completely obliterated as a problem on a slate across which a wet sponge has been drawn,” she wrote in the spring of 1930. “How can words express the feeling of utter desolation and heartache which comes over you when you know that your home, the place where you were born, brought up and lived, has been left for the last time and you can never return?”

Poor and without lawyers, she and others lamented a fate they could do nothing to stop. Few had wanted to leave Osborn Bridge, Denton’s Corners, Day Center and other villages in the flood-prone valley that the Iroquois tribe centuries before had called “the drowned land.”

The plan was devised by a commission whose members came from distant corners of the state. Locals soon found it was Ford and other emerging industrialists who were pushing for the dam. Down the Hudson River, factories lost production time to regular spring floods and to power shortages every summer.

Land speculators began snatching up bargains before 1924. For many, the money wasn’t nearly enough, even if their modest holdings were located in what newspapers described as a wild and marshy “stubble-sprinkled” valley of farmland “far from the most fertile in the state.”

“There are a few things money can’t pay for,” Ethel Wilber wrote, “and your old homestead is one of them.”

On March 27, 1930, the Sacandaga River’s enormous force of 200 million gallons per hour was unleashed--for the first time, by man.

Ten-year-old Frances LaPier watched as the filling reservoir covered much of her childhood. It swept away the Old Stone Church, the one-room Day Center Flats school where she was comforted the year her mother died, and Johns & DeLong Dry Goods & Groceries where she went for candy whenever she scraped up a spare penny.

“I feel like they just came in and said, ‘You have to do it. If you can’t move it or won’t move it, we’re going to burn it down and move it for you,’ ” LaPier said 70 years later.

“Everyone has memories of their elementary school,” said her daughter, Ruby Marcotte. “Unfortunately, Mom’s memory is of burning the school. How do you explain that this is what we need to do to make electricity for people down the river?”

The 600-foot covered bridge at Fish House, which Archie Bulger jumped off every July 4 for a pint of whiskey, was in the way. Even as legislators introduced a bill to save the 1818 treasure, water swept it aside.

“The old bridge whose timbers have resounded to the tramp of footmen and horses and later the roar of autos . . . has been tipped over by the rising flood to lay sprawled and partly submerged like a monster fatally stricken,” Wilber wrote. “Did not this landmark deserve a different fate?

“Truly,” wrote Wilber, “this should be called the Lake of Destruction.”

About that time, reports started circulating of a few suicides by aging farmers who lost old family farms, said historian and author Larry Hart.

Dynamite blasted from 1927 to 1930. Thick smoke billowed as brush, trees, homes and stores were burned in the valley one journal described as looking like an army encampment.

Few embittered locals were willing to work on the dam project. Those who did were relegated to the backbreaking task of clearing trees and brush--in part because they couldn’t be trusted on construction.

In Northville, now a quaint Adirondacks crossroads, eight hotels flourished, filling their rooms with hundreds of workers imported from Buffalo and Canada, Hart said.

Benjamin Denton, sawmill foreman and father of four, was one resident idled when factories closed.

He and his wife, Jessie, pooled their savings and bought the general store in Day. Horses slowly pulled the store to higher ground, where it opened a new life for 12-year-old Marian, his oldest.

“They gave you a price, and you had no choice,” she remembered.

Like many people in the area, Jessie Denton sewed leather gloves at home, at 50 cents per dozen, for factories in nearby Gloversville, named for the trade. Nellie Acker sewed gloves at home too, but she had fewer options than the Dentons. A widow in her 90s who lived in Parkville since just after the town was settled in the 1840s, she couldn’t rebuild.

“It’s terrible! It’s just awful to have to move from your home,” Acker told a neighbor, schoolgirl Charlotte Russell, as the reservoir water rose. “You won’t have any neighbors. It’s a tragedy.”

Acker moved to a nursing home, Russell recalled, where she died.

Today, at the rear of an old Adirondack cemetery in Conklingville are three rows of foot-square stone markers, 85 to a row, all darkened by age. There are no flowers, no parting verses, no crosses, no names.

“B-90” rests next to “B-87,” just behind “B-15” and “B-17.”

The stones mark some of the 3,872 relocated graves from communities that were flooded. Hundreds couldn’t be identified.

“Osborn Bridge? There is no such place,” Ethel Wilber wrote in 1930. “The homes of several thousands of people in the Sacandaga Valley have been abandoned not because the inhabitants wished, but because they must.”