But you have to be a diver, or a historian, to learn where these strands of abandonment lead. At the northern end of the Saugatuck, 100 feet below its surface, are the remains of Valley Forge - stone walls and hitching posts, foundations and roads.
The village near the Weston-Redding border had a history, a place in the world
"The people of Valley Forge had made iron and steel for the War of 1812, for the railroads, for the Civil War,'' said James Lomuscio of Weston. "It was a place with a sense of identity.''
Now it is gone, flooded out. But Lomuscio, a journalist who now teaches at Western Connecticut State University, has brought its story to the light in, "Village of the Dammed'' published by the University Press of New England.
The book chronicles Valley Forge's gradual 19th-century evolution as a small, vital industrial center, then its bitter, losing fight against the Bridgeport Hydraulic Co., the water company that built the reservoir. The book also touches - lightly, but tellingly - on the lessons, and consequences of its story.
Lomuscio shares the anger of the families driven out of the their homes. But he also acknowledges that the 880-acre reservoir and the thousands of acres of now preserved land are great natural resources in the middle of one of the most densely populated counties in the country.
"It could have been developed into one huge house on top of another,'' Lomuscio said, speaking last week at Ridgefield Commons, a senior living community ."So we all benefit from having the reservoir. But just because we benefit, does that cancel out the injustice?''
And, with the national furor still present over a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed New London to take land through the power of eminent domain, there's an additional relevance to the book. It shows the battles fought 60 years ago are still being fought.
"The poor always take it on the chin,'' Lomuscio said. "They're always the first to suffer. Highways don't go through wealthy neighborhoods. They go through poor neighborhoods.''
The hamlet of Valley Forge was settled by Welsh immigrants in the 18th century, who found the Saugatuck River valley had the three elements needed to run iron mills - ore in the ground, trees to burn for charcoal. and water to power the bellows.
The first iron plows manufactured in the United States came from Valley Forge. Its small factories churned out farm tools, axes, pins and wagon wheels. It supplied iron to the government in the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and crowbars to the workers building the New York-New Haven railroad line.
But the valley never grew into a serious manufacturing center. As Lomuscio points out, it could never compete with a city like Pittsburgh when it came to producing iron. But its factories were in business at the turn of the 20th century, with farmers finding jobs in the mills when they weren't tending their fields.
There is a remarkable photographic record of Valley Forge, compiled by Charles A.D. Adelbert Whitlock, a 19th century photographer. Whitlock's sister lived in Valley Forge and he took several pictures of the hamlet - its homes and mill buildings; its schoolhouse, complete with a line of students; the rustic Valley Forge glen, crossed by a wooden foot bridge.
Lomuscio's favorite is a family posing in front of their farmhouse, with a nicely-groomed white cow tethered to the fence in front of the house. If you could afford a white cow, Lomuscio said, that was a sign you were doing well.
The people in the photos, Lomuscio writes "seem all so unsuspecting as they went about their daily lives.'' In 30 years, those lives, would be uprooted in the deepest sense of the word.
Samuel Senior, president of Bridgeport Hydraulic, had come to the realization around 1900 that a flourishing city like Bridgeport was going to need more water. Like many 20th-century industrialists, he laid out his plans on a grand scale. Those plans were to create three large reservoirs in Fairfield County.
The water company's charter gave it the power of eminent domain - the right to pay people and take the land it needed. But Lomuscio said the water company's offers to land owners were hardly fair - $500 for 11 acres, $1,400 for 19 acres, $7,250 acres for 72 acres. This was less than the land's assessed value, and far less than the state of Connecticut was paying at the same time to buy land for the Merritt Parkway.
"Bridgeport Hydraulic was the only bidder and people got pennies on the dollar for their land,'' Lomuscio said. "They got bamboozled.''
The town of Weston rallied to fight Bridgeport Hydraulic, and save the picturesque hamlet and river valley. Towns people formed the Saugatuck Valley Association to fight the utility in court. Artists painted the Saugatuck River to show the world the beauty of the spot. The state's Federated Garden Clubs supported the effort. So did the Connecticut Socialist Party. So did the state's governor. Wilbur Cross.
But the law is the law and Bridgeport Hydraulic had it on its side. It won case after case in the land disputes, all decided by Bridgeport judges
"Environmentalists didn't have much clout then,'' Lomuscio said
Once it bought the land, the utility clear-cut it. Then over a period of a few years, it began demolishing Valley Forge, moving a few homes to higher ground, burning down the rest. When the Great Depression hit in 1939, no one could afford to resist any longer. The town of Weston disbanded the Valley Forge school district. The bodies in the hamlet's cemetery were disinterred and moved to Redding's Hull Cemetery
Weston resident Ted Coley - a boy when Bridgeport Hydraulic put the torch to his grandparents' farm - told Lomuscio the years hadn't dulled his outrage.
"You see,'' Coley told Lomuscio, "as I get older, it gets worse for me.'' Asked about Bridgeport Hydraulic, he told Lomuscio flatly: "I hate the water company.''
At Ridgefield Crossings last week, Lomuscio admitted to being deeply troubled by the use of eminent domain when it means driving people off land they loved. At the very least, he said, the residents of Valley Forge should have gotten a fair price for their land, not what Bridgeport Hydraulic deemed a fair price
"It's one thing to lose your home, another to lose your entire village,'' he said. "Look what can happen when power is abused in the name of progress.''
But Lomuscio also sees the flip side. The region now has the Saugatuck Reservoir. From the beginning, Lomuscio said, the reservoir fit perfectly into the landscape. It looks like the glaciers left it there, not the Samuel Senior Dam in Weston.
And in the past decade, the environmentalists won. Twice.
In 1999, a coalition of state, local and land trust forces stopped Aquarion - which had acquired Bridgeport Hydraulic - from selling the 700-acre Trout Brook Valley in Easton and Weston to developers who planned to build a gated community and exclusive country club. Instead, the coalition saved the land for open space, in part by arguing that Bridgeport Hydraulic had no right to use its powers of eminent domain to buy land in one decade, then sell it for a profit a few decades later.
And in 2001, in the largest land purchase in Connecticut's history, the state Department of Environmental Protection and The Nature Conservancy paid $90 million to the Kelda Group - a corporation that had purchased Aquarion - to preserve 15,300 acres. The great majority of land was in Fairfield County, surrounding the Saugatuck Reservoir.
Lomuscio is a fisherman who regularly casts a line into the Saugatuck Reservoir. It is, he openly admits, a beautiful place. But knowing about Valley Forge has made it, for him, a haunted place as well.
Looking across the reservoir, he admits, he wishes to also see horses and buggies, a one-room schoolhouses and the people of a lost hamlet.
Contact Robert Miller
or at (203) 731-3345.