Gaysville and the Great Flood of 1927

by Elisha Lee, for The Curious Yankee

I’ve always been drawn to lost places. As a boy, I fished with my father on the White River between Stockbridge and Bethel, Vermont, a place where even a teenager could sense something missing – perhaps it was the solitary bridge pier rising out of the riverbank in post-apocalyptic fashion, or the 19th-century mansion seemingly out of context on an otherwise unremarkable section of Route 107. Dad, always more interested in what was happening in the water than around it, simply said that there had been a town here and it had washed away. His explanation only piqued my curiosity.

Gaysville wasn’t actually a town but an unincorporated village in Stockbridge, and yet it was a good deal more than a couple of buildings at a rural crossroads. Situated at “the narrows” of the White River, it was an ideal site for a mill. In 1832, two brothers, Daniel and Jeremiah Gay of Sharon, Massachusetts, established the Gaysville Manufacturing Company to produce woolen fabrics. The business must have prospered, as shortly thereafter, Daniel advertised his success with an imposing Greek Revival mansion built on the high ground overlooking his mill and the growing village below.

The next industrialist to set up shop in Gaysville was Thomas Greenbank, who purchased an existing mill in April of 1856. Greenbank was an interesting character, the son of a Lancashire Quaker who had developed a large and successful woolen mill in a section of Danville, Vermont still known as Greenbank’s Hollow. Greenbank’s first mill, located on the east side of Bridge Street at Route 107, burned in 1860. He rebuilt it shortly thereafter as a five and seven-story structure.

Like Daniel Gay, Thomas Greenbank built himself a home that showcased his success and operated his mills for some 13 years before relocating to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Reluctant to leave the home he had built in Gaysville, he hired a crew to dismantle it and took it with him. The Lawrence venture, Berkeley Mill, failed in 1879, and I can find no evidence that the house was ever reassembled. His Gaysville mills were sold to a consortium of local businessmen who ran them until a disgruntled former employee burned them to the ground on October 22, 1888. They were never rebuilt.

By 1869, when the map above was created, Gaysville was a bustling village with several woolen mills, a hotel, two churches, two stores, a sawmill, and a wooden rake factory. The White River passed through a dam and beneath Bridge Street near what is now Route 107 and then split, with the main channel on the north side and a mill raceway to the south. The island formed by the two streams just below the village was a popular, if unproductive, site for gold mining until the early 20th Century.

In 1895, a hydroelectric plant was built on the south side of the White River, bringing electricity to the neighboring town of Bethel some six miles downstream (the plant appears just to the right of the bridge in the photo above). Four years later, the White River Valley Railroad was built, a short line running west from Bethel through Gaysville to Rochester. The track followed the twists and turns of the White River and was locally known as “The Peavine”. Built in the hope of attracting commerce to the upper valley, it was a tenuous business venture from the start, in receivership before construction was finished, and often delayed by washouts, landslides, and debris on the tracks.

On the evening of November 3, 1927, a heavy rain began and continued unabated for three days. The White River reportedly rose 20 feet in 12 hours, washing over the Gaysville dam and shifting course around it, slicing directly through the heart of the village. Some 30 buildings, including 15 homes, a general store, a church, and the mills, were washed away. The Peavine lost virtually all of its track between Bethel and Rochester, the Gaysville station, and even the locomotive and cars, caught while trying to make it back to Bethel and buried in sand and gravel. Remarkably, there was no loss of life, but most of the village was left homeless.

As the water receded a strange and desolate scene was presented. The place where the village stood is an incredible mass of rocks and gravel. The rock formation reminds one of the “Giant Causeway”. There is absolutely not one foot of anything left resembling soil, not a sign that any building ever stood there, not a stone that looks like a foundation wall.1

The images juxtaposed below may be the best summary of Gaysville’s fate. Both were taken from nearly the same vantage point on the south side of the river near what is now Route 107, looking downstream toward Bridge Street. The large barn on the north side of the river provides a useful reference point for assessing the extent of the loss.

Understanding the few remnants of Gaysville requires a bit of effort – the ruins of the hydroelectric plant and dam are easily found in the brush off Bridge Street just north of Route 107. This was where the river originally passed under the road, and Greenbank’s Mills, which burned in 1888, were situated directly across the street. The present bridge, constructed in 1929, lies about 300 feet farther north than the one lost in the flood. The homes and businesses that once lined both sides of Bridge Street and River Road now lie in the riverbed.

The Great Flood of 1927 was the worst natural disaster in the history of western New England, with calculated losses of more than $28 million in Vermont alone – well beyond the famously self-reliant state’s ability to repair on its own.2 Vermonters rallied, as they have always done, this time with the help of the federal government. Gaysville, however, couldn’t be rebuilt – there was literally nothing left. Without “the narrows,” there was neither a reason to rebuild nor a location in which to do so.

The White River Valley Railroad was reconstructed and ran for another five years, but the Great Depression shuttered the industries that had made it even marginally profitable. The final train ran on April 30, 1933. The last vestiges of the village, including Chedel’s General Store, were demolished when the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962 mandated the widening of Route 107. Daniel Gay’s mansion, reincarnated as the Belcher Memorial Library, still looks out across a valley now wooded and empty, reminding us of a time when Vermont was a patchwork of little villages connected by dirt roads, each filled with farms, mills, and a promise of prosperity that nature ultimately couldn’t deliver.

1 The Rutland Herald, November 17, 1927

2 H. B. Kinnison, The New England Flood of November, 1927 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), 83