The Ashokan Reservoir can hold 128 billion gallons of water. Located in Ulster County, NY fairly close to Woodstock (the town, not the festival site), the Ashokan started providing water to New York City on Nov. 22, 1915. It was built with slave labor, by workers making pennies a day and for the most part spending their money in the company store. Photo by Eric Francis.
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http://dgeneratefilms.com/catalog/before-the-flood-yan-mo/
I recall seeing a video/reading about how the townspeople (the project in china) were forced to move then ‘paid’ – that is for a few months the new basis of their local economy was – to tear down their own homes and businesses in preparation for the flooding.
Like digging your own grave prior to execution.
Sam, thanks for developing this part of the conversation. I easily access the poignancy of these disruptions of the organic pattern of community life. I’m fascinated by the images and accounts of what was and what no longer is.
I know that part of why I can do this is that I have a sense of community that most people take for granted. I know many shopkeepers in my neighborhood and I live in a neighborhood…in an old town…so I tune into this as living history as well…the remnants of pre-Revolutionary Kingston are all around me: stone houses hundreds of years old, graves, odd street names, the feeling of a Dutch settlement…
And I feel the absence of these towns that I’ve never known: magnificent, old spots in the Hudson Valley that were eviscerated, along with their community histories (cemeteries, libraries, town halls, etc.). Once familiar places that no longer exist. To me they exist in a very nearby parallel universe.
So, too, does a vast swath of the Ukraine….
http://planetwavesweekly.com/resources/chernobyl.html
As of June 2008, China relocated 1.24 million residents, ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province),[85][86] about 1.5% of the province’s 60.3 million and Chongqing City’s 31.44 million population.[87] About 140,000 residents were relocated to other provinces.[88]
Relocation was completed on July 22, 2008.[86] Chongqing City will encourage an additional four million people to move away from the dam to the Chongqing metropolitan area by the year 2020.[89][90][91]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_gorges_dam
The thing that struck me first re your beautiful photo e, was not only the birth channel bit but that the luxury of water reflected in sky also can be seen to look like oil, thick and rich and similiar in how it can be for construction or destruction.
Reading…just discovered that a town was sacrificed in 1964 — Cannonsville, NY in Delaware County. A woman whose grandparents lived there for 50 years tells the story as she remembers it:
http://www.bearsystems.com/cannonsville/stories.htm
Poke around and there are other links, including the one that has three newspaper photos showing the town disappearing.
Here is a website devoted to towns sacrificed to the New York City watershed system, which includes the Ashokan. Going over bridges or driving along highways hear Ashokan, you can see signs that say things like “Former site of West Hurley.” There are still foundations of prior towns that show up on the edges of the water when the level is low. Imagine people who had lived these places for 50 or 60 years or longer, being told they have to pull up roots and relocate to someplace unfamiliar.
This website that 2,800 graves were exhumed and reinterred at other cemeteries in the area.
http://bearsystems.com/losttowns/lost.html
Gorgeous photo, Eric!!
hyp – mmmhm. they all look like birth openings in the great mother.
what in this country was not built on slave labor?
beautiful photograph picking up the mirror of sky in the water with mountain on the horizon … its almost a weird resemeblance of the the photo of our thin galaxy brought down to the planet, or a frequency reading on a graph…
Thank you Marilee
Make that Ashokan — not Ashoak.
)
oops, make that sacred, not scred.
Eric,
So, so beautiful; I think Van Gogh would have wanted to paint this scene. The Quabbin Reservoir in Mass. is a similarly spiritual place – perhaps these reservoirs feel so scred because of the towns that were drowned and the people displaced in order to create them so that city folk would have drinking water.