Engineered Removal: A Reservoir, a Base, and a Bypass
The engineer is the state.
The road into Dana Common is closed to vehicles. You walk in past Gate 40, off Route 32A in Petersham, about one and three-quarter miles through second-growth white pine, the kind that came up after the pastures went unmowed. The road surface is still there under the leaf litter, asphalt going soft at the edges. There are stone walls along it, the walls that farmers built before the state bought the land. When you reach the common, the trees open out and you find yourself standing in a meadow with a granite monument at the center and a set of stone cellar holes arranged around the perimeter, each with a laminated marker naming the building that used to stand on it. Dana Center is the best-preserved village site among the four drowned towns, and it is the only one you can walk across without diving gear.
In 1938 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts disincorporated Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott, four towns in the Swift River Valley, and began preparing the valley floor to hold the water that would become the Quabbin Reservoir. About 2,500 people were evicted. More than 7,600 graves were exhumed from thirty-four cemeteries and reinterred at the new Quabbin Park Cemetery in Ware. The state took property by eminent domain when homeowners refused to sell, paying fair market value that historians record averaged about $108 per acre. Owners of businesses in the four towns received nothing for their businesses. The legislature’s disincorporation act took effect on April 28, 1938, and the Enfield Town Hall hosted a farewell ball on the night of April 27. Water began filling the valley in August 1939, and the reservoir reached its full 412 billion gallons in 1946.
Dana Center sits on a small rise that the reservoir never reached. Enfield, Greenwich, and the lower parts of Prescott are under sixty feet of water. The boundary between what the state spared and what the state took runs through the Swift River Valley like a waterline on a hull. A visitor who spends an hour at Dana comes to understand that the phrase “public works” did a great deal of labor in the justification, and that the valley was informed of the works more than it was consulted about them.
Dana, Limestone, Maine, and Glenrio, Texas, differ in almost every respect of their working lives. Dana was a hill town with dairy and orchards. Limestone was a potato-shipping depot that was transformed into a Strategic Air Command base in 1947. Glenrio was a Route 66 crossroads split between two states, built around gasoline and beer. The three places converge on one fact in their deaths: each was removed by a specific government decision made far from the place itself, for reasons that had to do with population centers or strategic calculations or traffic engineering. Each removal was legal and was treated as settled by the authorities that ordered it. Each left a physical residue that tells a visitor what was taken.
Call this category engineered removal. The engineer is the state. The removal is an outcome the plan required, and the affected place is a cost line in the plan’s ledger.
Loring Air Force Base sat on 9,472 acres at the northern tip of Aroostook County, fifteen minutes by road from the New Brunswick border. The Air Force acquired the land in 1947 as Limestone Army Air Field, drained the peat bogs, poured a runway long enough to take a B-52 at full fuel load, and built the installation into one of the Strategic Air Command’s largest bomber bases. The site occupied the closest continental American point to Europe by the Great Circle route, which gave it strategic value during the Cold War. At its operational peak Loring employed more than ten thousand people counting uniformed personnel, dependents, and civilians. Limestone, a potato-shipping depot with about twelve hundred residents before the war, grew into a town of roughly ten thousand, most of them directly or indirectly on the federal payroll. The supermarket, the car dealerships, the two weekly papers, and the hospital in Caribou all ran on Loring money.
In July 1991 the Base Realignment and Closure Commission placed Loring on its closure list. Congress accepted the commission’s recommendations. Loring officially deactivated on September 30, 1994. Limestone’s population fell from about ten thousand to under three thousand over the following decade. Enrollment in the school district dropped by two-thirds. The hospital in Caribou reduced staffing. Aroostook’s potato economy, which had been weakening because of mechanization and the consolidation of processing, lost the supplementary payroll that had kept marginal farms viable through bad years. Property values in the region fell sharply enough that some houses were abandoned because selling them at the new market rate would not cover the mortgage principal. Estimates place the regional population loss in the decade after closure at about fifteen percent.
What the closure left behind was specific. The runway is still there, used by the Loring Commerce Centre for industrial tenants and occasional motorsport events. Base housing was partly demolished and partly rented, and some remaining units are occupied by the Job Corps program that took over part of the cantonment area. Groundwater under the flight line carries per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances from decades of firefighting foam use, a contamination pattern repeated at dozens of former SAC bases. EPA listed Loring on the Superfund National Priorities List in February 1990, before closure was even announced, and remediation continues more than thirty years later. Limestone pays for water testing it did not once need.
The BRAC process was designed to make base closures harder for Congress to obstruct by forcing an up-or-down vote on a commission-selected list. The design was effective because it removed individual congressional veto points. It was not effective as a mechanism for protecting affected communities because that was not its design goal. Aroostook County had one congressman, and the congressman who held the seat when Loring was listed could not prevent the closure. The decision was made by people who had never been to Limestone and who were not accountable to anyone who had.
Glenrio sits on the Texas-New Mexico state line, west of Amarillo, east of Tucumcari. The town was founded in 1903 as a Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific siding called Rock Island, renamed Glenrio in 1908 from the English “glen” and Spanish “rio” despite sitting in neither a valley nor along a river. Its second life began in 1926 when Route 66 came through. The Texas side had the service stations because New Mexico’s gasoline tax was higher. Bars operated on the New Mexico side because Deaf Smith County, Texas, was dry. The Little Juarez Diner served travelers on both sides of the line. Homer Ehresman’s State Line Café advertised itself as the First Motel in Texas when you were heading east and the Last Motel in Texas when you were heading west. At its peak in the years after the Second World War, Glenrio had about thirty permanent residents, a post office, a motor court, three filling stations, and a string of businesses that ran on the thousands of cars a day moving through on the Mother Road.
The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 authorized the construction of I-40, which replaced Route 66 across much of the Southwest. The new interstate opened on the Glenrio section in September 1973, skirting the town about a mile to the south. Traffic on the old road collapsed. The Ehresmans moved their business five miles west to Endee, New Mexico, which is now also abandoned. Charles Jones relocated his cafe and filling station north to the bypass in Oldham County. The Texas Longhorn Motel closed in 1976. The post office followed in the 1980s. By 2000 the population had fallen to five. Seventeen structures are still standing in the old town, including the Little Juarez Diner, a Texaco station, the Texas Longhorn motel office, and several outbuildings, most of them unroofed. In 2007 the National Park Service listed the surviving complex as the Glenrio Historic District, a designation that protects the ruins from demolition without restoring any function that once supported them.
The mechanism of Glenrio’s removal is worth looking at carefully. The federal government did not condemn the town, did not evict anyone, and did not compensate anyone for lost business. It simply built a better road about five thousand feet away and allowed market behavior to do the rest. Every gas station, diner, motel, and garage in Glenrio depended on travelers who had no reason to get off the interstate once the interstate existed. Residents left because there was no longer any economic reason to stay. The removal was accomplished by indifference, and the legal apparatus of compensation that applied to Dana and to Limestone did not apply to Glenrio. No one was owed anything, because on paper no one had taken anything.
These three cases sit on a spectrum of state action. Dana was removed by direct expropriation: the Commonwealth bought the land, took the land, and flooded the land under the police power of eminent domain. Limestone was removed by withdrawn subsidy: the federal government had built the town’s economic base with its own payroll, and when the payroll was reallocated, the town collapsed into its pre-Loring dimensions while keeping the housing stock and sewer system of its larger self. Glenrio was removed by rerouted traffic: no one took anything from Glenrio in a legal sense, and the town died anyway because every business in it was a roadside business and the road was gone.
Across the spectrum, three patterns repeat. The first pattern is that the decision is made in a place other than the affected place, by people who are accountable to a different population. Boston needed water. The Department of Defense needed to consolidate strategic aviation. Federal highway planners needed a faster route across the Panhandle. None of those needs were wrong on their own terms. They were simply not the needs of Dana, Limestone, or Glenrio, and the affected populations were too small and too peripheral to register as a political constraint on the decision makers.
The second pattern is that compensation, where it exists, is calculated on the wrong ledger. Dana residents received the assessed value of their real estate from the Commonwealth at roughly $108 per acre. An assessed value of a house is not the value of the community the house sits in. A family that received four thousand dollars for a farmhouse in 1938 could buy a comparable farmhouse in another town for roughly that amount. They could not buy the neighbors, the church where their grandparents were married, the schoolhouse where their children knew every other child, or the cemetery where their ancestors were buried. Limestone received BRAC redevelopment funds and technical assistance from the federal Office of Economic Adjustment. The funds helped establish the Loring Commerce Centre on the old base. They did not replace the ten thousand people who had lived there. Glenrio received nothing because no one had technically taken anything from Glenrio.
The third pattern is that each removal leaves a specific kind of ruin, and the ruins are legible if you know how to read them. Dana leaves foundation holes and a granite monument above the waterline, and cellar holes and stone walls below it. Limestone leaves an intact runway, rows of base housing in varying states of occupation, and PFAS in the groundwater. Glenrio leaves a diner, a Texaco sign on a post, and the concrete pads of gas pumps with the bolt holes still visible. In each case the ruin is the residue of a decision, and the decision is usually not the one the informational signs at the site describe. Dana’s signs describe the construction of the reservoir. Limestone’s former base has a small museum that describes the flying mission of the 42nd Bomb Wing. Glenrio has a brown historic district sign describing Route 66 nostalgia. None of the signs describe the mechanism of removal in terms the residents experienced.
Engineered removal is a category that sits uncomfortably between policy success and policy harm. Boston has clean water. The Cold War ended without a nuclear exchange. Interstate trucking carries most American freight. The three removals were all part of public projects that most Americans would endorse if asked. The projects themselves are mostly not in question here. What is in question is what the country owed to the populations who paid for the projects with their places, and whether the compensation paid was the right measure of what was taken.
The answer at Dana, at Limestone, and at Glenrio appears to be that compensation was measured by what the government was willing to write a check for, which was always less than what the affected population had lost. That measurement gap is the common factor across the three cases, and probably across the much larger set of American places that have been removed by dam, by base closure, by highway rerouting, by rail line abandonment, by industrial consolidation, or by the simple withdrawal of a post office. Policy debate tends to frame these removals as unfortunate side effects of necessary public action. The view from Dana Common suggests a different frame: the removals were the cost line that made the action possible, and the cost was paid by populations whose consent was structurally unavailable to seek.
A visitor who walks out of Dana Center on the way back to Gate 40 passes the stone walls again, and this time notices that the walls continue into the reservoir on the east side of the common. They go down the slope, into the water, and keep going. The stones were set there by farmers who expected their sons to farm the same fields. Many of those sons are buried at Quabbin Park Cemetery in Ware, near the ancestors who were exhumed before the flooding. The walls remain under the water, arguing with the water about where the pasture used to end.