So the government emptied the valley for the dam — hundreds of houses standing dark and abandoned up and down the river, waiting for a lake. And here's a chapter most folks never heard: for a few wild years, other people moved into those empty houses. And they did not want to leave.
To keep the abandoned farmhouses from just rotting, the government rented some of them out cheap, short-term. Well, this was the early nineteen-seventies — and the word went out to a certain crowd that there was a whole river valley of cheap old farmhouses in the woods, an hour or two from New York City. So they came: back-to-the-landers, hippies, artists, young people chasing a simpler life, looking to grow their own food and live free in the country. For a little while, this condemned valley filled up with a scruffy, hopeful, communal counterculture, squatting in the ghost houses of the folks who'd been forced out.
The government wanted them gone — they were, after all, living on land slated to be flooded. When the leases ran out, the authorities moved to clear them, and the squatters dug in and refused. It turned into a standoff, and then a spectacle: in nineteen seventy-four, federal marshals came in to physically evict the holdouts, hauling long-haired young people out of mountain farmhouses — and it made the papers, and it looked terrible, the full weight of the federal government rousting a bunch of kids out of houses it had emptied for a dam it would never build.
So picture that as you drive: the same lonely valley, filled twice over with people told to leave. First the families who'd been here for centuries. Then the dreamers who came after. Both moved out by government order, for a lake that never came. This pretty, empty country has cleared out more folks than most cities hold. It's quiet now. It wasn't always.
Photo: Warrenhanson · CC BY 3.0
