The Spring Freshets

Looking down the hollow from a point near the top of our property, this 1889 view shows the destruction wrought by the flood of 1889. The chair factory still stands at the left, but the streambed and the road up the hollow have all been scoured clean. The barn at the distant center was our garage, and near it stand several women in long black dresses, surveying the damage. In the stream lies a millstone, washed several hundred feet down from the grist mill by the force of the water!

The same area taken from the same spot, in 1978.

Another flood of nearly the same proportions took place in 1948, and again destroyed the roadway that ran up the hollow. Here one can see the stream, on the right, and another stream now running where the road had been on the left.

After the floodwater subsided, in the spring of 1948, men walked up the washed out road near the building that later was our garage. It wasn't until a concrete wall was installed upstream that the destructive periodic spring freshets could be controlled.