Page 8 - BusinessWest February 19, 2024

Gone but Not Forgotten
Author Keeps Memories Alive of Lost Quabbin Towns
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
[email protected]
Elena Palladino in the house that inspired her book, Lost Towns of the Swift River Valley.
Elena Palladino recalls that, when she and her husband first walked through their stately white home in Ware, they noted that some of the pieces didn’t really seem to fit.
Indeed, the home is Colonial Revival in style, but many of its fixtures, including the pocket doors with ornate brass pulls, were Victorian. Their presence — which made the home even more attractive, and intriguing, in their minds and helped com- pel them to buy it — presented somewhat of a mystery.
One that was solved when one of their new neighbors referred to the property as the ‘Quabbin house.’
Palladino would eventually learn that this home was built by Marion Andrews Smith, who had lived in Enfield, one of the four towns flooded and essentially wiped off the map to build the Quabbin Reservoir; Dana, Greenwich, and Prescott were the others.
Smith, as Palladino would also learn, was the last surviving member of a prominent mill-owning family that actually had a section of Enfield, known as Smith’s Village, named after them. Smith certainly didn’t want to leave Enfield, a town that she and other family members were very involved with, and she was one of the last residents to depart. She wanted to move the large Victorian home in which she lived to another location, but it wasn’t logistically feasible to do so. So she took what she could with her and made those pieces — everything from doors to molding; floorboards to wainscotting — part of the home she built in Ware.
“It’s a very beautiful place. But I do think
it’s important to remember that’s it’s a beauty that comes from the loss of those towns and the loss of community.”
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8 FEBRUARY 19, 2024
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