“So the memories need not fade”: Writing Continuity Across Rupture in Rural New York

• In Event: Staying with the Changes: Displacement, Disaster, and Transformed Landscapes in the United States

Abstract

During the twentieth century, New York City constructed a massive water supply system in rural New York, spanning over 1,600 square miles of watershed and comprising six large reservoirs. In building these reservoirs, the city eliminated more than twenty small villages and hamlets, displacing farm and village residents. While infrastructure projects like New York City’s water supply are often thought of as public goods, for the communities that live closest to them the development of these projects can be experienced as a disaster, one which echoes across generations. In the decades after New York City’s rural water supply was built, residents in the region began to write books, poems, and songs memorializing the lost reservoir valleys. Unlike local histories, these books do not set out to tell the history of these valleys, instead they function as both site and practices of collective memory. In this paper, I explore how place, belonging, and the past are produced through these small production publications. These books, I argue, are ways of asserting, maintaining, and reinscribing continuity in relationships to places to which the writers cannot return. In this presentation, I will focus on how visual and narrative representations of place reinscribe lost valleys, asserting an affective temporality that overwrites the rupture of reservoir construction and displacement.

Author

• Anna Lehr Mueser, University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science