In the Shadow of the Dam
The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874
PROLOGUE
On the last day of the coroner's inquest into the cause of the Mill River flood deaths, Joel Hayden Jr. was the morning's first witness. Two weeks earlier, on May 16, 1874, three of his factories had been destroyed when the Williamsburg reservoir dam broke, sending an avalanche of water over five factory villages that lined the Mill Valley in western Massachusetts. When the flood reached Haydenville, the mill village his father had built, it picked up a house and slammed it into his brass factory with such force that the three-story brick structure collapsed, ends folding over the middle as though it were a cardboard box. Brass goods, the company safe, and even the granite columns that had framed the entrance to the office building were found hundreds of yards downstream amid heaps of debris so dense and tangled that men used crowbars to pry the items apart. Twenty-seven of the 139 people killed were from Haydenville.
Coroner Ansel Wright offered Hayden the opportunity to make a statement before questioning. He acc ... read full excerpt from In the Shadow of the Dam: The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874 ebook
