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Early one May morning in 1874, in the hills above Williamsburg, Massachusetts, a reservoir dam suddenly burst, sending an avalanche of water down a narrow river valley lined with factories and farms. In just thirty minutes, the Mill River flood left 139 people dead and 740 homeless -- and a nation wondering how this terrible calamity had happened.
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.
- Sales Rank: #1483967 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Free Press
- Published on: 2007-08-10
- Released on: 2007-08-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .90" w x 6.00" l, .99 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Sharpe, the former director of education at the Smithsonian's American History museum, delivers a compelling account of an 1874 disaster in Massachusetts that became a turning point in the history of American capitalism and technology. Sharpe is a skilled historian who does a superb job presenting the details of the careless planning behind what became at that point the most deadly dam failure—a reservoir dam situated high above a number of factory and farm towns that suddenly burst, unleashing 600 million gallons of water that destroyed most of the communities in just four and a half hours, leaving 131 dead and 750 homeless. She gives sympathetic, closely detailed descriptions, from a range of historical sources, of the terror faced during and after the disaster, as people searched for bodies "amid wreckage so dense and snarled that mattresses and quilts were knotted with belting and machinery, and hanks of raw silk were lodged with toys and potatoes." She also provides an excellent historical context for the event, including the lack at that time of any standards for dam construction, the general public's ongoing cultural preoccupation with disasters and the unfortunately common belief that disasters were "part of the unavoidable and necessary cost of industrial development." She nicely details the lasting social changes that came in the wake of the flood, such as how it galvanized public opinion in support of better building standards and how it gave an important boost to the emerging engineering profession in the U.S.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
On May 16, 1874, the Williamsburg reservoir dam broke, sending an avalanche of water from the Mill River over five villages that lined the valley in western Massachusetts. In 30 minutes, the villages and their brass and cotton factories were destroyed, leaving 139 people dead and 750 homeless; one-third of the victims were under the age of 10. Sharpe, who grew up a few miles from the disaster, spent many years researching the story. She chronicles the building of the dam, the tragedy itself, and its aftermath. Word of the flood traveled fast, bringing aid in the form of money, clothes, blankets, and search teams, as well as looters. Sharpe also documents the efforts to rebuild the towns with the help of hundreds of volunteers. She describes the inquest that followed and the resulting verdict, and what was done to prevent another such disaster. The author has done an incredible amount of research, drawing on newpapers, magazines, and journals of the time, along with manuscripts, maps, photographs, books, and interviews. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Elizabeth M. Sharpe is a historian, writer, and consultant for museums. The former director of education at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, she holds a doctorate in American history from the University of Delaware. A native of western Massachusetts herself, Elizabeth Sharpe grew up hearing how the Mill River flood destroyed her great-great-grandfather's shop. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A Gripping Story .
By Janet McGowan
This is a great book. In the Shadow of the Dam tells a surprisingly intimate, gripping story about the failure of the Willaimburg Dam in 1874. Although the reader starts the book knowing its end -- 139 people will die from a break that was inevitable since the dam was so poorly built -- Elizabeth Sharpe deftly builds suspense with her careful, compelling details. She animates the long dead and the time in which they lived. As I read, I came to care about people living in the towns and villages under the dam. Sharpe brings to life the factory owners who built the dam on the cheap, the people who labored in their factories, the doomed children and families living below the dam, and the rescuers who warned as many as they could. I felt for the many people who spent weeks and weeks digging out the corpes and debris fused into the dense muck which settled in Florence Meadow. Sharpe's recounting of the ball of tree limbs, mud, broken houses, livestock, rocks and bodies created by the floodwaters is riveting. It is a story of real people and the time in which they lived -- when industrialists could build almost anything without safety requirements, when communities reflexively helped each other, when companies were almost totally unaccountable for their recklessness, and when there was virtually no help for the poorest victims.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Intense
By Joe Roofer
A very well written and obviously well researched book, In The Shadow Of The Dam tells the whole story of this disaster in such an engaging and intense way that it's a real page-turner. I'm local to the Williamsburg area, grew-up in town and have been waiting for such an in depth examination of the event.
Johnstown, PA has a 165 acre National memorial park while Williamsburg has a small plaque affixed to a rock in the woods near the old spillway behind no tresspassing signs. Thank you for telling the tale it seems no one wanted to tell...
An absolute must for history buffs!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Connected many dots for me
By Dorothy Higgins
Joel Hayden Jr. was my great grandfather. My siblings and I grew up with bits of information regarding the flood but no real history of what had happened. My mother spent summers during her childhood in Haydenville (she is a Hayden), and we visited Haydenville regularly. But I don't think even she knew many facts.
It was very moving to read my great-great grandfather's dying words, and know that although he was a businessman, he was a decent man. In my reading Joel Jr. spent most of the family fortune trying to rebuild the business on site in Haydenville instead of abandoning the town and people.
I am very grateful to Elizabeth Sharpe for having written In the Shadow of the Dam. It was well written and provided me with information about my family that may have otherwise been forever unknown to me.
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