The Power of Words. Robert L. Smith: Tapping the human element in a small town story

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Robert L. Smith: Tapping the human element in a small town story

Related: Scituate Reservoir: A story of sacrifice

        Back at Bowling Green State University, Emil Dansker used to preach that to cover a town well a reporter had to know where that community had been, where it is and where it was going. "And the most important thing is knowing where it's been," he said.
        Driving helps. I like to learn a town by driving the back roads, which are often named for famous sons or for villages that once mattered. But in Scituate, the roads kept ending at water. Finally, I asked an old-timer why Rockland Road never reached Rockland. He smiled and said, "Because it's about 80 feet under water."
        That's how I learned of the seven mill towns drowned to create the Scituate Reservoir. He called them the "lost villages," and that alone sounded like a story. Another bit of advice from j-school gave me the angle: Focus on people.
        The reservoir was an engineering marvel, I knew, and its creators saved an archive of facts and figures listing numbers of houses razed, mills demolished, rivers dammed. But what happened to the people?, I wondered. How do you clear a village? What did it feel like to live in a condemned town?
        We're doing a series of history pieces that look back at specific decades, and that gave me the chance to visit, if only briefly, the lost villages. Other writers on the beat before me, like Alexis Miller, had already done lots of groundwork, so I was not starting from scratch.
        Still, time is a scarce resource in the bureau, and that compelled me to narrow the focus. I picked a single village, the smallest village, looked at the names of the townspeople and opened the phone book, seeking descendants.
        A few calls over a few days, and I was steered toward Shirley Arnold, a descendent of the Knight family of the former village of Kent and, as luck would have it, an amateur historian.
        She was able to breathe life into photos and land records that recorded the condemnation of her family's house, in 1916. More traditional sources, like the town historian, gave me context and filled in gaps.
        I tried to capture some of what it was like to be forced to leave a home of generations. I tried to convey the message that the reservoir exacted a human price.
        Later, several readers told me they had never looked at the water in that light, and that it made them appreciate it a little more.

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