Photographer of a Lost Valley | Timeless New England
Photographer Burt Vernon Brooks found inspiration in the rural villages along the Swift River in Massachusetts.
Dozens of photographs by Burt Vernon Brooks, including Billings Sisters with Milk Pails, have been collected and preserved by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Included in the collection are images of people and places in the four Massachusetts towns that would be flooded in the 1930s to create the Quabbin Reservoir: Enfield, Dana, Prescott, and Greenwich.
Photo Credit : courtesy of Burt v. Brooks Photograph Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
Photo Credit : courtesy of Burt v. Brooks Photograph Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
At first glance, this photograph of the Billings sisters, Emma and Margaret, collecting milk pails on a winter day sometime between 1905 and 1910 in Greenwich, a village in western Massachusetts, seems to be just an ordinary farm chore frozen in time. The photographer was Burt Vernon Brooks. Born in 1849 in Brimfield, Massachusetts, Brooks grew up in the hardscrabble farm life, but in middle age he discovered his calling as a photographer. Finding his eye drawn to the simple tasks of country people going about their lives, he spent his days in the rural villages of the Swift River Valley, where he was “hardly ever seen without a camera strapped to his back,” writes Donald Howe in Quabbin: The Lost Valley. Brooks died in 1934, five years before the Swift River was dammed and the villages he had known were lost to history. Of the four villages that were drowned, Greenwich was the oldest. What Brooks did not know when he took this photo of the Billings sisters, and so many others, was that he was creating a visual epitaph for the valley. Today, his images remind us not only that people once lived where there is now only water, but also that a photograph sometimes preserves more than memory. Sometimes, it also becomes a memorial.
—Mel Allen
Mel Allen
Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.
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