Welcome! A Professor friend once told me to just tell the story! Well, actually there are 4 parts to this story. The initial part presented here is about Shannock Village and its surroundings. What I intended to do there, and why and how I ended up there for almost a half century, will be detailed at a later time. But for now, I will describe the “where” and the genealogical “who” that I encountered there. So here we go…
Autumn, 1970: Naively, though purposely, heading out to find the missing piece….
Skip ahead almost a decade later when a colleague points out an article in Yankee Magazine…
The cover showed a painting of an ideal New England Village..a fictional peaceful place….
A unique opportunity just miles away…
Two villages for sale… and the one tucked away in a small river valley in Rhode Island, would reveal a long and eventful history…
For Sale!! An unincorporated village divided into two Towns by the Pawcatuck River…
A friend with a small airplane helped to access an initial global look..
Fertile pastures watered by a meandering stream…
In the center, a sizable industrial building, seemingly abandoned…
A Horseshoe shaped manmade waterfall…
Ruins…
Curious…
What was going on down there?
A front page headline in a July,1979 newspaper, indicated a likely challenge…
Ongoing events only created more questions…
And worse…
More bad news…
The little village library would leave …
Hope to keep a Library Annex fails..
The Historic Horseshoe Falls Barn and Dairy was destroyed…
The entire planned addition to the village dating to back to 1918 was sold off in pieces.
A proposed nuclear power plant a few miles away was a point of discord and debate among the locals.
In the end it was voted down, but had created much tension locally for many years..
Run down and no longer needed…
Final Stop: 1981