I read Riel Nason's The Town That Drowned earlier this month. It spoke to me in a way I don't really understand and broke my heart a little.
I know that it's a fictional account of a fictional town: I'd like to learn a little more about the real communities that were affected by the construction of the Mactaquac Dam.
I just finished The Vanished Village: Jewett's Mills, N.B., 1804-1967 ... But it was a little insubstantial and really more focused on the earlier days of the community.
Does anyone know of any more in-depth local histories, personal narratives, people stories, about that event? (I'm not wedded to the idea of a book: I'll take a meaty website or recorded oral history.)
If ever you wake one day and the people who run your little province tell you they're going to drown the valley you lived in your whole life in, the valley your parents were born in, the valley your ancestors thought was as good as a gift from God when they sailed to this New World and were given a piece of it to start their lives over again (and that's why it's called God's country), if men who live in a city of planted elms on squares as big as half your front lawn, and work in buildings from which they should be able to see the same river as you (but somehow you just know they don't see it the same way), if those men decide for you that a tidal wave is coming to wash your whole life away-- well then know that there will be at least one, maybe some, who will love that beautiful land so much they won't ever want to see it different, won't ever have it turned into only a memory, and would rather become one with it than let it go.
The Town That Drowned, Riel Nason, p. 197
(Note: Just found Disregarded Sentiments: Discovering the Voices of Opposition to the Mactaquac Dam by Samatha Bourgoin. Loading to my eReader now.)
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