Atlantis Lite

I’ve been thinking about towns submerged by reservoirs. I don’t know why that suddenly came to mind or why it fascinated me without prompting. It’s one of those things.

This is also a topic that interests many other people apparently. They’ve written all sorts of definitive lists of underwater ghost towns. I won’t replicate those definitive works. One can review them later if interested. It’s a surprisingly common phenomenon. People need water. Towns are flooded. I’ll simply provide a few examples spread across the globe that I’ve explored via satellite.


Three Gorges

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first, an instance of scale so incredibly audacious that it cannot escape without mentioning.

It’s difficult to even conceive of a situation where nearly 1.25 million people had to relocate. That happened in the years leading up to 2008 because of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtzee River in China. To put that in perspective, that’s like compelling everyone in Rhode Island or everyone within the city limits of Birmingham, England, or everyone in Adelaide, Australia to pack up and move to a new home.


Lake Eucumbene

Old House & Shed. Photo by Graeme; (CC BY-NC 2.0)

I’ve been impressed by Old Adaminaby in New South Wales, Australia. It drowned below the waters of Lake Eucumbene in 1957. The town moved nearby to higher ground before the waters inundated lower-lying areas (map). The only remnants left behind were a few ruins that rise above the waters periodically during protracted droughts.


Quabbin Reservoir

The Internet believes that the most significant example in the United States involved four towns in Massachusetts submerged by the Quabbin Reservoir (map). I base that solely on the fact that this seemed to be the most common result whenever I consulted the major search engines. Four towns that had been around since the late Eighteen or early Nineteenth Century (Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott) were all flooded behind the Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike by 1939.

I’m more partial to Bluffton, Texas, though.

IMG_0652-1. Photo by Merinda Brayfield; (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Old Bluffton

Like the example from Australia, the original Bluffton townsite rose from the dead during a recent drought. Ordinarily it rested beneath the placid waters of Lake Buchanan, a reservoir along the Colorado River of Texas. It originally disappeared from view in late 1930’s (map).

I guess I’m a sucker for those towns that are drowned, only to claw their way back into the visible world in zombie-like fashion when waters recede. I could probably write an entire article based entirely on submerged towns that have reappeared because of recent droughts. Several others in the United States appear with minimal searching: Monument City, Indiana; Corydon, Pennsylvania; and Los Arboles, New Mexico all rose from their watery graves, along with townsites in many other parts of the world.


Rybinsk Reservoir

I’ll feature an example from Russia because loyal reader “January First-of-May” hails from there and has had to endure so may articles on 12MC focused on nearly every location other than Russia. Here you go, January First-of-May, just for you.

Mologa in the Yaroslavl Oblast flooded in the 1940’s as a result of the creation of the Rybinsk Reservoir. This happened at the confluence of Mologa and Volga Rivers. Allegedly this required 130,000 residents of Mologa to relocate. However, about three hundred residents refused to leave and drowned. Joseph Stalin didn’t mess around.

Oddly enough, Google Maps actually labeled the ghost town. Even thought it sat underwater. Even though it disappeared in the 1940’s.


Ladybower Reservoir

I haven’t forgotten about the United Kingdom either. Plenty of examples existed in the UK, too. How about Ladybower Reservoir in Derbyshire? The little English villages of Ashopton, Derwent Woodlands Church and Derwent Hall all found themselves on the wrong side of the dam. They succumbed to the waves in 1944. In Wales, Capel Celyn disappeared too, thanks to the Llyn Celyn Reservoir (map).

The list goes on and on.

Comments

10 responses to “Atlantis Lite”

  1. The Basement Geographer Avatar

    This is one that hits home personally since I live in a valley where numerous villages were flooded out by dam construction, and friends and family members lost their homes and farms. And, working at the archives here, every day I’m hit with it. Every autumn when the lake goes back down to its original level and exposes the sand where the old townsites used to be is still a slap in the face to many Arrow Lakes residents even 45 years later.

    That being said, at low water it’s a very surreal landscape to walk about. For kids who grew up in the valley after 1968, most of them have probably whiled away many a day in the playgrounds formed by the exposed sands. There are some days where it seems you can just walk out into the water forever. Occasionally you still find relics in the sand (although most of them have been picked off). While 45 years have managed to wash away much of the preexisting landscape, you can still see the old highway bed pop out of the water in a few places, and long-gone villages and lots still show up on maps occasionally.

  2. Kevin Avatar
    Kevin

    Dana, MA is not fully submerged- you can see the outline of the old town green in this aerial shot:
    http://tinyurl.com/bavyb65

    There are walking tours available twice a year (I think). I’m dying to go on one. I believe the roads, that are left anyways, in the town are actually maintained by some branch of the Mass government. The whole story of those 4 towns is fascinating- to me anyways.

  3. Philip Newton Avatar
    Philip Newton

    Speaking of towns being relocated, do you have an article about towns making room for open-pit mining?

    I read an article about that in western Germany (in the Ruhr area), where lignite quarrying has displaced some towns. And I think there’s an example at the CZDEPL tripoint.

    1. Aaron of Minneapolis Avatar
      Aaron of Minneapolis

      In that vein, there’s Hibbing, Minnesota, which moved south a mile or so around 1920 to make room for the vast Hull-Rust-Mahoning iron mine. Many buildings were jacked up and moved, including a sizable wooden hotel that ran off the road and crashed (which I can’t seem to find a picture of in a cursory search). A little bit of the old town survives near the mine overlook; the streets and some retaining walls are still there, but the buildings are long gone.

      (Trivia bit: Greyhound started out in 1915 as a shuttle bus between the towns of Hibbing (at its old location) and Alice (which was absorbed by the new location).)

      1. Aaron of Minneapolis Avatar
        Aaron of Minneapolis

        Almost forgot: The Minnesota Historical Society has a brief article on the move at its MNopedia site. There’s also a children’s book about the move called (approriately enough) The Town That Moved, which I read when I was in grade school.

  4. Pfly Avatar
    Pfly

    One of the sadder for me is Tellico Dam, TN, which drowned the sites of a bunch of once-major Cherokee towns including Chota (once the “capital” of the Overhill Cherokee), Tanasi (from which the name “Tennessee” comes from), Toqua (an ancient town that long predated the Cherokee and the dominant town in the area in pre-Columbian times), Tomotley, Citico, Mialoquo and Tuskegee (birthplace of Sequoyah). Granted these places were more archaeological sites than towns when the waters rose, but still. Also, if you visit this area there is very little about the drowned ancient Cherokee town sites–rather there is a full fledged “memorial” and reconstructed “Fort Loudoun”–a British fort built near the Cherokee towns. Sigh…

    Something similar with The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River, though with even less memorialization than one finds on the Little Tennessee River…

  5. wangi Avatar
    wangi

    Lake Sakakawea

  6. Fritz Keppler Avatar
    Fritz Keppler

    Zapata, Texas was also submerged by the rising waters of the Falcon International Reservoir on the Rio Grande between Texas and Tamaulipas, Mexico. The town (actually an unincorporated CDP) relocated onto higher ground upon dam closure in 1953, but it lost its bridge across the river, so there is no longer a legal way to cross directly from Zapata County to the estado of Tamaulipas.

  7. Drake Avatar
    Drake

    There are lots of ancient sunken cities around the Med. and Black seas. About 10 years ago Herakleion, Canopus, and Menouthis were round off the coast of Egypt, believed to have been destroyed and sunken in the 7th or 8th century A.D. after earthquakes. Lots of little neolithic settlements have been discovered that were sunken near the Black Sea after the sea levels rose following the end of the ice age, not sure if any of them have been named. The ultimate would have to be the settlements discovered along the bottom of the Med. which were flooded when the “dam” broke at Gibralter and flooded it.

  8. Rp Avatar
    Rp

    Very interesting. As a kid I lived near Fairfield, Missouri, one of several small towns submerged by Truman Lake.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfield,_Missouri

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