In the Shadow of the Dam : The Aftermath of the Mill River Flood of 1874

Rating:
Summary: A Gripping Story .
Review: This is a great book. In the Shadow of the Dam tells a surprisingly intimate, gripping story about the failure of the Willaimburg Dam in 1874. Although the reader starts the book knowing its end -- 139 people will die from a break that was inevitable since the dam was so poorly built -- Elizabeth Sharpe deftly builds suspense with her careful, compelling details. She animates the long dead and the time in which they lived. As I read, I came to care about people living in the towns and villages under the dam. Sharpe brings to life the factory owners who built the dam on the cheap, the people who labored in their factories, the doomed children and families living below the dam, and the rescuers who warned as many as they could. I felt for the many people who spent weeks and weeks digging out the corpes and debris fused into the dense muck which settled in Florence Meadow. Sharpe's recounting of the ball of tree limbs, mud, broken houses, livestock, rocks and bodies created by the floodwaters is riveting. It is a story of real people and the time in which they lived -- when industrialists could build almost anything without safety requirements, when communities reflexively helped each other, when companies were almost totally unaccountable for their recklessness, and when there was virtually no help for the poorest victims.