Introduction

As early as the 1890s, the people of the Metropolitan Boston area, through its Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), eyed the Swift River Valley in West Central Massachusetts for a massive artificial reservoir.

Bills drafted and introduced at the Massachusetts General Court in the early 1920s would have allowed the Commonwealth to “disincorporate” four towns in that valley to create such a reservoir.

Such bills were threats that the few residents of that area would never have amassed the political might to defeat, even if other towns west of Boston, already affected by similar, smaller reservoirs, added their voices to the fight.

Before the final vote at the State House, near-simultaneous inventions of cheap, efficient, and easily implemented desalinization processes that also treated wastewater changed the political landscape.

These discoveries allowed for the construction of sufficient-sized water treatment/desalinization plants near Boston, supplying the growing city with the needed water. These plants were more accessible to build and cost much less than moving four towns’ worth of people, ending any talk of taking land in the valley.

Treatment plants soon flanked Boston, north and south. As the patent was not enforced, plants based on the original design soon popped up nationwide. However, using certain pork-derived products in the original design stymied worldwide adoption. Due to religious objections, almost the whole Middle East and significant portions of Africa would not use the purifier until well into the twenty-first century.

These inventions, coupled with the gravity-fed reservoirs built near Framingham, Sudbury, and Worcester in the late 1800s and early 1900s, helped ensure fresh, clean water would be available for the thirsty Metro Boston region for the foreseeable future before World War II.

The residents of the cities and towns surrounding Boston soon began to push back at the urban planners. Successful ‘suburban revolts’ occurred in towns around Boston in response to highway plans during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The environmental movement of the 1970s ensured the valley would remain mainly as it was despite Metro Boston’s growing population and water needs.

Adding capacity to the original treatment plants handled the increase in water demand for a while. Improvements in the base technology and miniaturization allowed in-home units at an affordable price by the start of the 1980s. This sounded the death knell for any thought that Eastern Massachusetts would ever need another reservoir larger than a water cooler.

Greenwich (pronounced “GREENwitch”) built a modern hospital in the mid-1930s with the help of the Work Projects Administration (WPA). Doctors vacationing from New York in the late 1920s had noticed the appalling lack of adequate medical care in the region. With their backing, the WPA constructed the hospital in the northeastern part of Greenwich Village. The Greenwich Village Hospital, now called Greenwich Village Medical Center (GVMC), replaced the much-added original hospital with a new complex in early 1983.

The hospital corporation now owned an expansive three-square-mile campus straddling the Greenwich-Dana town line and employed over twenty-five hundred men and women. Its parent company – Swift River Health Care – employed a further two thousand people across three other hospitals in the towns of Ware, Gardner, and Athol.

GVMC left as much of the flagship campus as possible, allowing it to blend into its surroundings while providing room for future growth. Upon completion of the new hospital complex, the site of the original hospital was returned to its pre-construction state and protected.

Prescott had been the poorest of the four towns in the MDC’s sights. It was also the one that was ready to hand the MDC the keys to Town Hall early in the reservoir discussion. Due to its topography, it became the town of choice for GVMC’s doctors to build their homes, owing to the views from either side of Prescott Ridge. These medical professionals helped bring much-needed tax and construction revenue to the area.