Before the Flood: Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Swift River Valley

Historian Rosenberg debuts with a granular chronicle of how four Massachusetts towns were leveled in the 1930s in order to create the Quabbin Reservoir, which provides water to Boston. Seeking to challenge “binary” histories of the event, which cast townspeople as the “losers” and state government officials and Boston residents as the “victors,” Rosenberg spotlights the engineers, many of them recent college graduates, who lived in the towns and became active community members, even as they plotted “the death of the Swift River Valley.” She uncovers the mutual respect that grew between the engineers and townspeople during the course of the 15-year project, but gets bogged down in the minutia of marriages, school board meetings, and other small-town social events. As a result, her accounts of the legislative battles leading up to the flooding, the history of Boston’s water shortages, and the work done to dig diversion tunnels, clear cut the land, and raze and burn the buildings, are obscured by details intended to personalize the engineers. Though she claims that “the story of Quabbin is a parable of everything that has gone, and continues to go wrong—and sometimes right—with American public works planning,” and that its lessons should be studied by today’s policymakers, who must plan for “more water-based human displacement” caused by climate change, Rosenberg doesn’t quite bring these intriguing points home. This well-intentioned history has a muddled message. (Aug.)