The town of Westview and its story are fictional but like Angela and Owen, I grew up in a “drowned town” that was partially razed and flooded in the early 1900s to create a reservoir that now supplies drinking water to over 60 percent of the state of Rhode Island. While doing research for this book, I was surprised by the number of other places throughout the US with similar stories—small towns chosen as locations for water sources, completely transformed by the rapid growth of nearby cities. Some of these towns were relocated, others were partially flooded, and still others were disincorporated, disappearing underwater. Some residents opposed the construction of these dams and reservoirs in their communities; many families were compensated for the loss of their homes and property. It’s easy to imagine how this could change a place in so many ways beyond just geography, and in creating this story and its setting, I was interested in exploring what the culture of a community might look like if this happened in a town where it was never supposed to, if the story you’d grown up hearing was really about the most powerful people’s need to control a narrative, and how that could trickle down, even generations later.
Library Booklists (librarybooklists.org) maintains a list of books and other information about real drowned towns, for readers interested in learning more.