Authors' search finds photos of Scituate's 'Lost Villages'

SCITUATE -- Ray Wolf says his mother dreamed of seeing a photo of the old family homestead, the one where she played as a little girl, before it was taken down, sacrificed when the Scituate Reservoir expanded its way through multiple villages.

Her village, Rockland, went the way of Ashland, South Scituate, Richmond and Kent, obliterated by 1925, lost to the Reservoir, but revived in Wolf's recently-released book, "The Lost Villages of Scituate," in which a photo of his mother's home has finally surfaced.

His mother, Helen O. Larson, longed to see that white house, craved it almost, but died well into her 90s with its image only a memory. No tangible reproduction of the two-story house where she was raised with four brothers existed, her son thought.

What Wolf didn't realize, he explains, is that a photo of her home, and of the other 1,194 buildings razed by the builders of the Scituate Reservoir, existed a short distance from his own Hope Village home, in the files of the City of Providence Water Supply Board. The board had deep records, detailed photos taken by John R. Hess who was hired to photograph the condemned buildings some 90 years ago.

"I used to take her back to see the foundation. It was up on a hill so it didn't go underwater but was in the watershed area, so they took it anyway."

Wolf didn't make the discovery about the photographs until after his mother had died. It was during an in-town candlelight cemetery tour in 2006, when Wolf was introduced to town historian Shirley Arnold, that he learned of the archived images.

Many hours of research alongside Richard Blodgett of the City of Providence Water Supply Board, he said, led to Wolf's recently released "Images of America Series, The Lost Villages of Scituate," with many of the book's photos coming from those archives, including the image of his mother's home.

"It was sitting right there. If she could have only seen it. I didn't think they (photos) existed," he said Wolf.

Wolf, 67, dedicated the book to his mother, "who was born and brought up in the lost village of Rockland." She was born in 1910, and attended the Rockland School, before it, too, was taken. By 1925, the village was gone.

Wolf started out putting together a book dedicated to his mother's lost village, and her prolific poetry, after she died in 2005. In looking for a publisher, he stumbled upon Arcadia Publishing, he said, but they were more interested in the specific villages lost to the reservoir, and less about his mother's poetry. So he switched his focus, the subsequent book bringing together in photo captions information about the loss of the villages, with portions of her poetry weaved within. Wolf said she produced two suitcases filled with poetry during her 94 years.

He was offering the 127-page book at the 43rd annual Scituate Art Festival that is also being sold by way of the Scituate Preservation Society, where email requests sent to RISPS@cox.net will be forwarded to Wolf.

"My mom was born and brought up in Rockland and she told many stories about how the man from the city came and put up notices saying the buildings where they lived would be torn down," Wolf related of the august story.

Just prior to the outbreak of World War I, Rhode Island's General Assembly, he said, in seeking new sources of clean water for the city, gave significant powers to a newly organized Providence Water Supply Board to find property in the long-considered Scituate area with its "numerous waterways...This led to the condemnation, by eminent domain, of 14,800 acres of land and buildings in the reservoir and watershed area," Wolf wrote.

Though the story is by now one long told in local schools and historical societies, the passage of time doesn't take away the sting in considering the numbers listed in Wolf's book.

"There were 1,195 buildings razed, of which there were 375 homes, 233 barns, seven schools, six churches, 11 icehouses, five halls, post offices, taverns, general stores, blacksmith and wheelwright shops, cider mills, two fire stations, 30 dairy farms," not to mention how some 1,500 graves had to be exhumed, and prosperous mills dismantled to take advantage of the available clean rivers, he said.

"When the condemnation notices went out, people could not understand. These are places where they had lived for generations. How could they just take their property? One guy told his daughter he was going out to tend to the cows in the barn. She found him hanging from a beam.

"Their whole life was there, working in the mills, buying from the local store. They just couldn't understand," Wolf said.

As he interprets the legal power of eminent domain, "for the good of the people," Wolf says "at the time, it wasn't good for the people that lived there in the five villages, but basically it was good for the people of Rhode Island."

Wolf, an assistant manager at TJMaxx, says looking back on that time period is "sad," but practically speaking, "what would we have done without the Scituate Reservoir? They needed water. Clean water. Something had to be done."

Still, the photos in Wolf's book illustrate the magnitude of tangible loss to the townspeople in terms of their history:

Page 23 shows a clean and sturdy Rockland School, two little girls standing in its meadow; page 24 shows the upright Rockland Christian Church aside the Remington Mill Pond; page 30 shows the Old Rockland Cemetery, its graves having to eventually be dug up and relocated; page 44 shows the village of Ashland, neighborhood house next to neighborhood house.

His mother continued thinking of the life she left behind as a youngster where the post office was in the general store. She'd stop there on the way home from school to pick up the mail. Though she remained in the area, Wolf says "she never got over the village being torn down. Her neighbors were dispersed, some never to be seen again."

By bringing these photos together documenting that era in Scituate history, Wolf has created his own legacy to his mother, making sure that her dear village of Rockland is not forgotten. His book begins there, in his mother's lost village, and ends with more than 220 photos later.

"It means so much to me," he said.