WENDELL — Robert Bowers was surprisingly upbeat for a man who, just recently, lost his house to a fire. “What can you do?” he said with a smile and a shrug as he surveyed what remained: charred walls, scarred beams, his younger son’s high school diploma propped up against a smoke-blackened mantel.
“I just want my house back,” said Bowers, who is 84. “I pay my taxes and mind my own business, and, well, things happen.”
The question is whether things could — or should — happen differently. The fire started when Bowers’s lawn mower overheated in his woodshed. Within minutes, the town’s fire chief, Matt O’Donnell, was there with a truck, a hose line, and a problem: He didn’t have enough water.
Somehow there’s never enough water around here, even though this small hill town is just a few miles away from the plentiful Quabbin Reservoir. But everybody who lives near the reservoir, and its 329 billion gallons of water, knows it’s off limits, and they know why.
“That’s Boston water,” Bowers said.
The Quabbin Reservoir supplies drinking water to 2.5 million people who mostly live in Greater Boston, but not a drop to those who live beside it.
Bowers, born in 1942, grew up in Athol hearing stories about how the Quabbin came to be. It’s a David and Goliath tale that traces back to the 1800s when Boston’s population kept growing as its water supply shrank. The state set out to identify a new source for clean drinking water and found one about 65 miles west — in the Swift River Valley.
In 1926, surveyors for the Metropolitan Water Supply Commission descended on the region “like an army in conquered territory,” according to a Boston Daily Globe article from that year. They were preparing for the creation of a huge reservoir and aqueduct that would carry water to the east. There was just one problem: To build it, planners would have to drown four towns to the west.
Villagers fought back mightily but were no match for the will of a thirsty metropolis backed by the state, and by the time the Globe visited in 1926, the reporter observed: “The power to resist has gone.” In the late 1930s, the state disincorporated and destroyed the towns, displacing over 2,000 people and digging up many more graves; cutting off industry; and reversing the fortunes of generations to come.
Today the towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott are lost to history — literally submerged under Boston’s drinking water. For years, the people who live closest to the reservoir have relied on private and municipal wells, along with limited funding from the state in exchange for the land it owns in their towns. But amid an extended drought, those wells are drying up, and so is another precious resource: cash.
Now, the rural rebellion that fizzled a century ago is getting a powerful second wind. It’s also getting more exposure this time around thanks in part to another human-made marvel: the internet. Around 80 community leaders from 12 towns encircling the reservoir are bringing a renewed fight for equity to Beacon Hill and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, or MWRA, which supplies wholesale water to 53 communities. They call themselves the Quabbin Watershed Stewards, and they’re pushing for more money, but they’re also trying to raise awareness around the issues their towns are facing, and they’re using websites, social media, and direct appeals to Greater Boston residents to help.
Under the Watershed Protection Act, which passed in 1992, Quabbin host towns must follow strict regulations governing land use and activities to keep Greater Boston’s water pristine. As a result, people here have given up liberties that others take for granted: everything from walking their dogs to building on protected property. And there’s a lot of protected property. The town of New Salem, for example, can’t develop 91 percent of its land, yet only 20 percent of its $3.7 million budget comes from the state.
There’s a pervasive sense here that Bostonians don’t know what goes into guarding their water supply, or what Quabbin residents have sacrificed to do it — essentially, the right to grow and thrive, the stewards say.
“It’s the lost opportunity cost,” said Matteo Pangallo, the land use clerk for Shutesbury.
There’s also an intensifying dispute over who’s actually paying for Boston’s water: the Quabbin stewards who are pushing for more equitable funding, or the customers footing the water bills.
“Generally, the idea that the urban core around Boston would be increasing its contributions to those towns out west is a tough sell,” said Richard Raiche, who is based in Somerville and chairs the MWRA advisory board.
“We’re not asking for anything we don’t feel truly entitled to,” said Jane Peirce, a retired watershed scientist, whose father was forced to leave the town of Prescott before it was flooded.
“It’s a matter of, ‘Hey, we’re over here. You’re taking our stuff,’ ” she said.
Peirce is among the Quabbin stewards whose ranks also include descendants, historians, and first responders like O’Donnell, a federal ecologist before he became fire chief last year. Most, however, are small-town officials on the front lines of two battles: water shortages and budget shortfalls.
Drought is making everything worse and exposing stark differences between east and west. While Bostonians freely wash, flush, shower, and spray their summer tomatoes with Quabbin water, Quabbin residents face water bans and contamination.
In New Salem, the town coordinator brought in buckets of water to flush the toilets. At Shutesbury’s town hall, a sign warns visitors not to drink the tap water — the town has spent around $700,000 to remediate toxic forever chemicals found in some wells. In Wendell, O’Donnell eventually drafted water from a nearby pond to put out the fire at Bowers’s house, but the pond was shallower than normal, which slowed him down.
Rural firefighters are used to working in small towns that have no fire hydrants, said O’Donnell, who is the fire chief for both Wendell and New Salem. Still, he couldn’t help but note that Boston’s firefighters use Quabbin water to put out their fires.
The harsh irony of living so close to the source — but not having access to it — is striking, but it’s not the point. What Quabbin residents really want is the means to keep their rural towns afloat as their schools face closure, their buildings, roads, and bridges fall into disrepair, and their public safety departments are stretched to the limit.
Earlier this month, Governor Maura Healey acknowledged the “pressing needs” of these Quabbin towns, while urging the state to more fully recognize their public service, in a letter to Stephen Estes-Smargiassi, interim executive director at the MWRA.
It’s not the first time Healey has backed the fight for Quabbin equity. In June 2025, she filed the Mass Ready Act, which proposes around $3 billion in environmental bond authorizations. It also directs the MWRA to make annual payments of $50,000 to each Quabbin host town for two years.
House and Senate versions of the Mass Ready Act both call for the establishment of a Quabbin Host Community Trust Fund to support critical needs in watershed communities; MWRA would deposit $35 million annually, drawn from ratepayer money. The Senate’s bill also creates a dedicated Quabbin seat on the MWRA board of directors.
“This is about the MWRA, as a broker of this natural good, doing a better job leveling the playing field,” said state Senator Jo Comerford, who represents part of the region.
Massachusetts owns parcels of land in cities and towns across the state, and it acknowledges such tradeoffs by providing payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOT. MWRA, in addition, has contributed more than $200 million in PILOT money for watershed protection since 1985 — but there was no comparable recompense for the region before then.
Even now, for the Quabbin region as a whole, the payments amount to a pittance at around 6 percent of the land’s actual potential tax value, the stewards say.
MWRA’s advisory board, which advocates for ratepayers, argues that raising water bills further would be hard on customers’ wallets.
The refrain is that “there’s no free money,” said Estes-Smargiassi, the agency’s interim director. “Every dollar that we raise comes from cities and towns — so that’s a dollar coming out of the pocketbooks of folks in Chelsea and Everett and Quincy.”
But some Quabbin advocates call foul on that framing. “He’s saying, ‘Oh, these Quabbin communities are going to hurt the poorest among us in Eastern Mass.,’ ” said Comerford, “and, in fact, some of the poorest among us are in the Quabbin communities.”
While the typical household in Boston already pays an average of about $1,300 for water and sewer services, Pangallo estimates the typical household property tax bill in Shutesbury is about $2,000 more than it would be if the Quabbin didn’t exist.
“The towns are effectively subsidizing the true cost of the water,” he said.
New Salem and Wendell became a case study for other small towns when they decided to share a fire chief to cut costs. Now, along with two volunteer teams, O’Donnell says he is also responsible for handling every emergency in about 50,000 acres of state-owned land and water, including forest fires, car accidents, and even a recent single-engine plane crash — anything that could contaminate the reservoir.
“We’re the ones who are stewarding this land,” he said, “and we’re doing it on our personal dollar.”
There’s a hearty, could-be-worse mentality among Quabbin residents. Some share a tragicomic sensibility. The New Salem General Store sells sandwiches named after the four sunken towns. Enfield is now a hot pile of corned beef with melted Swiss and kraut.
The stewards even created a new bumper sticker: “QUABBIN REGION: We Make Boston Possible.” But pride only goes so far. Young people are leaving because they can’t afford to live somewhere so severed from economic opportunity. Old-timers often stay but feel forgotten.
A former deputy fire chief in town, Bowers still lives on his property with a clear view of his fire-ravaged house; only now he stays in a trailer, where he listens to country music and snacks on sugar-sprinkled strawberries when he needs a break. For weeks, he has been pulling burned siding off his house one piece at a time, but he’s easily winded.
“They don’t care about us out here, the people in Boston that’s running the state,” he said.
“Generational trauma” lingers and is sometimes layered with bitterness toward the east, said Pangallo. “It is a strange and strained relationship that goes back to the taking of the Swift River Valley. That anger and resentment has never disappeared.”
Some residents carry “the genetic imprint of having come from a place that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Peirce, the retired watershed scientist, who lives in Orange. She practically grew up in the Swift River Valley Historical Society museum, which displays artifacts recovered from the four lost towns.
While her parents were intent on preserving Quabbin history through the museum, Peirce is more concerned with safeguarding the water source.
“Every single person who lived in the Quabbin had to leave. . . . Every road, every church, every business, every tree, every flower, every bird’s nest was cleared out to create this resource for clean water,” she said.
Since February, the water level has been in “below normal” status due to drought — on a recent afternoon, it was 9 feet lower than usual. While not an emergency, it’s still alarming for local residents unaccustomed to seeing such a large swath of shoreline.
Meanwhile, the faucets keep flowing in the east.
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.