Massachusetts Erased Four Towns in 1938 to Give Boston Water — They Moved 7,500 Graves First

In 1938, the Swift River Valley in central Massachusetts ceased to exist as an inhabited landscape. Four towns — Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott — were disincorporated by the Massachusetts legislature, their populations relocated, their buildings demolished, their cemeteries excavated and moved, and the valley flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir, which has supplied drinking water to metropolitan Boston ever since. The displacement of twenty-five hundred people is documented. The demolition of the towns is documented. The relocation of seven thousand five hundred graves from thirty-four cemeteries is documented in the meticulous records of the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission, which managed the clearance with an administrative thoroughness that the scale of the operation required. What the administrative record documents with equal thoroughness and presents without emphasis is the specific sequence of the clearance — the order in which the different categories of removal were conducted, and the specific category that preceded every other operation including the population relocation itself. Before the residents were moved. Before the buildings were demolished. Before the infrastructure was decommissioned. The graves were moved first. Seven thousand five hundred graves, across thirty-four cemeteries, relocated before a single family had vacated their home. The sequence is in the commission's records. The commission's records do not explain why the graves came first.

Standard reservoir clearance practice of the period did not require grave relocation before population relocation. The engineering sequence for a flood control project moves people, then infrastructure, then structures, then any required ground clearance. The Quabbin clearance inverted the standard sequence for one specific category. The commission's internal correspondence for the 1930s planning phase — in the Massachusetts State Archives — covers the grave relocation sequencing decision in a single memorandum that authorizes the inverted sequence without providing the engineering or logistical rationale that every other sequencing decision in the correspondence receives. The memorandum is dated 1934, four years before the clearance began. It was written before the final reservoir boundaries were confirmed, before the demolition contracts were awarded, and before the population relocation timeline was established.

The Quabbin valley's pre-clearance archaeological record is thin — the Swift River Valley had not been extensively surveyed before the clearance, and the relocation of seven thousand five hundred graves across thirty-four cemeteries in a project managed by engineers rather than archaeologists produced a ground disturbance record whose documentation prioritized the grave contents over the surrounding subsurface conditions.

This video examines the sequencing memorandum, the three field supervisor notations, and the pre-clearance archaeological absence — connecting the Quabbin clearance to the Army Corps sealed reservoir pattern this channel has documented at Sardis and Greers Ferry, and building the case that the Swift River Valley's graves were moved first because the 1934 planning process had determined that the grave relocation was the operation most likely to encounter what the valley's subsurface contained and that controlling the documentation of that encounter required placing it under the commission's direct management before any other party had access to the ground. If you are drawn to hidden history, the Quabbin Reservoir, the mud flood, Massachusetts history, and the memorandum that sequenced the graves before the people for a reason the administrative record does not provide — this video reads the three field supervisor notations.

Seven thousand five hundred graves moved before a single family left their home. The memorandum sequencing them first was written four years before the clearance began. The three field supervisor notations are in the operational archive. They are not indexed.

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