Nineteen Reservoirs by Lucy Sante

Author:Lucy Sante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Prospective layout drawing of the Pepacton Reservoir and Downsville Dam showing the reservoir, dam, highway system, and nearby landscaping, July 1943

Despite its strategic importance for the watershed, Delaware County was remote. Legend has it that the local Native Americans—primarily Mohawk—did not live there, but used it as a hunting preserve; white settlers did not arrive until the very end of the eighteenth century. It took until 1906 for the first railroad to be built in the Pepacton Valley—the Delaware and Eastern, or, as of 1911, the Delaware and Northern—which connected to the New York, Ontario, and Western at East Branch and to the Ulster and Delaware at Arkville. Its line was sufficiently wild in appearance to pass for Alaska in a 1921 Vitagraph feature, The Single Track, directed by Webster Campbell and starring Corinne Griffith and Richard Travers. (It is now lost.) The railway was so underused that in 1926, steam passenger trains were discontinued in favor of a gasoline-powered Brill car—essentially a rail-mounted bus. (It was affectionately called the Red Heifer because its whistle sounded like a moo.) Not many residents owned motor vehicles. In 1950, half the farms had no tractor or truck, a third had no telephone, a tenth had no electricity—and the ones that did mostly obtained it in the wake of the Rural Electrification Act of 1935.

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