Background on Prescott, Mass.
Rural and sparsely populated, Prescott, Massachusetts, was founded in 1822 along the ridge separating the West and Middle branches of the Swift River. Its three villages (North Prescott, Atkinson Hollow, and Prescott Hill) never amounted to more than a few houses each, and the town's total population never exceeded 500. In his Gazetteer of Massachusetts (1847), the optimistic John Hayward described the town's character: "The surface of this town is rough and uneven, and in some parts quite hilly; but it has a strong soil, with considerable arable land; the greater part of it, however, is better suited to grazing than tillage." Although there were sawmills and relatively small-scale lumbering and quarrying, most of the inhabitants made their living through farming and dairying, with the elevated landscape and glacial soils being particularly favorable for apple culture. The town was site of a home of Daniel Shays, who led an armed rebellion in 1786-1787 to protest the debt and financial exigency grinding small farmers in the Commonwealth. Prescott was named in honor of Oliver Prescott, a surgeon who accompanied the forces called out to suppress Shays' Rebellion.
Like the other towns in the Swift River Valley (Dana, Enfield, and Greenwich), Prescott's fortunes dimmed considerably after the 1890s. Confronted with a critical demand for water in the Boston metropolitan region in 1895, the Commonwealth authorized the new Metropolitan Water District to seek new water supplies in the western parts of the state. Construction of the Wachusett Reservoir along the Nashua River (1897-1908) bought time, but ultimately failed to meet the projected demand, and by 1922, the MWD officially signaled its intention of damming the Swift River Valley, signifying an end to habitation there. All residents were ordered removed from the valley, with homes, farms, and places of business systematically destroyed, the land cleared, and graves removed.
Work on the Quabbin Reservoir began four years later with construction of the Ware River Diversion, a tunnel connecting the Wachusett Reservoir with the Ware River, followed in 1936 by construction of the Goodnough Dike and Windsor Dam. Prescott's small population led it to become the first of the four towns to be vacated. The town was nearly empty by 1928, when the remaining residents voted at town meeting to cede administration to the state. The town was officially disincorporated on April 28, 1938, and on Aug. 14, 1939, the reservoir began to fill. The above-water portions of Prescott were annexed to adjacent New Salem and Petersham, with the spine of the town along Prescott ridge now forming a peninsula into the Quabbin Reservoir.
