The Village Under Sparrow Gap Reservoir

My grandmother was born in a village that is now under water.

The village was called Wenlow. It sat in a narrow valley in the hills, on a creek that ran down to the Ardle River. Wenlow had a school with two rooms, a mill, a church, a store, and about ninety houses. Farms covered the slopes above the creek. My grandmother says the valley was cold in winter and green all summer, and that everyone knew whose cows had gotten out.

Thirty miles east, the city of Oakvale was growing. Factories opened, and families came for the work. The city drew its water from shallow wells and from the lower Ardle, which by then ran past mills and sewers. People got sick from that water. In dry summers, the wells ran low and the city rationed water by the block.

City engineers went looking for a better supply. They wanted water from high ground, above any town or factory, so it would arrive clean. They wanted a place where a dam could be short and still hold a great deal of water. They found both at a narrow rock gap in the hills above Wenlow. People there called it Sparrow Gap.

The engineers explained that the whole valley was part of the city's future watershed. A watershed is the area of land where every drop of rain drains toward the same place. If the city owned the valley, it could keep farms and factories out of it, and the water behind the dam would stay clean.

The state gave Oakvale the power to buy the land. Families who did not want to sell were bought out anyway. My grandmother was eleven. She remembers the surveyors, then the letters, then the trucks.

The city moved what it could. Workers took apart the church and rebuilt it on a road above the new waterline. Graves were dug up and moved to a cemetery on the ridge. The mill and the school came down. Some families moved to that ridge road together, and others left the valley for good.

The dam closed in the fall. Water rose slowly through that winter and the next. By the third spring, the valley was a lake.

Oakvale got what it wanted. The new supply was clean, and the sickness that had come from the old wells faded. The city stopped rationing in dry summers. The water ran downhill to the city in a tunnel, so no pumps were needed and the water cost little to deliver. People in Oakvale drink it today, and most of them have never heard of Wenlow.

The valley got something else. The people who moved were paid for their land, but they were not paid for a place where everyone knew everyone. My grandmother went back once, in a dry August when the reservoir dropped low. Out on the mud she found a line of stones. It was the wall of a sheep pen her father had built. She did not stay long.

Projects like this one changed the rules that came after them. Today a city that wants to flood a valley must hold public hearings, study what will be lost, and pay to move the people who live there. Some of those projects are built anyway, while others are stopped by what comes out at the hearings. Either way, the people in the valley now have a place to speak, which my grandmother never had.

She is ninety-four. When it rains hard on the hills, she still says the creek will be up by morning.

1. Why did the city of Oakvale need a new source of water?
2. Why was the narrow rock gap above Wenlow a good place for the city to build a dam?
3. What happened to the church, the graves, and the school in Wenlow?
4. The passage says the valley became part of the city's watershed. Using the passage, explain what a watershed is.
5. Name one benefit that Oakvale gained from the reservoir.
6. Name one thing the people of Wenlow lost that money could not replace, according to the narrator.
7. Why did the old stone wall appear during one August but not during most summers?
8. The narrator says the rules changed after projects like this one. Why would a government require public hearings before flooding a valley today?