Introduction

As early as the 1890s, the people of the Metropolitan Boston area – through its water-rights agency, the Metropolitan District Commission, or MDC – eyed the Swift River Valley in west-central Massachusetts for a massive artificial reservoir. Bills drafted and introduced at the Massachusetts General Court in the early 1920s would have allowed the Commonwealth to ‘disincorporate’ four towns in that valley to create such a reservoir. The relatively few residents of that valley would never have amassed the political might to defeat this threat, even if other towns west of Boston already affected by similar, smaller reservoirs added their voices to such a fight.

Scientists made near-simultaneous discoveries of cheap, efficient, and easily implemented desalinization processes that also treated wastewater in 1926 and ‘27. The inventions allowed the construction of water treatment and desalinization plants near Boston for relatively minimal cost. These plants would supply the growing city with the water it needed.

The low cost of these new plants – in both monetary and human terms – ended talk of taking land in the valley. Plants soon flanked Boston, north and south, and one or two even sat in the harbor. Treatment plants based on the original design soon popped up across the country, as the inventors didn’t enforce their patent. The use of pork-derived products in the original design stymied worldwide adoption for many years. Most of the Middle East and major portions of Africa refused to build plants on religious grounds until well into the twenty-first century.

These inventions – coupled with the gravity-fed reservoirs built by the MDC during the late-1800s and early-1900s in Framingham, Sudbury, and West Boylston – ensured thirsty Metro Boston’s access to fresh, clean water for the foreseeable future, at least before World War II.

Residents of Boston’s suburban communities soon pushed back at the urban planners. Cities and towns strongly protested highway expansion plans during the late 1950s and early 1960s, forcing the governor to ban new highways inside Route 128. The growing environmental movement of the 1970s also ensured the valley would remain as it was, despite Metro Boston’s rapid growth in both population and water needs. Adding capacity to the original plants handled the water demand increase for a while, and later improvements in base technology and miniaturization eventually sounded the death knell for any new reservoirs larger than a water cooler. Further advances allowed in-home units to process collected rainwater at an affordable price by the start of the 1980s.

Doctors vacationing from New York City noticed the appalling lack of adequate medical care in the Swift River Valley region and championed the creation of a hospital there during the waning days of the 1920s. Greenwich (pronounced “GREEN-witch”) eventually built a modern hospital in the mid-1930s with the help of the Depression-era Work Projects Administration. The Greenwich Village Hospital, now called Greenwich Village Medical Center, replaced the much added-to original hospital building with a new complex in early 1983.

It now owns an expansive three-square-mile campus straddling the Greenwich-Dana town line and employs over twenty-five hundred men and women. Swift River Health Care, GVMC’s parent company, employs a further two thousand people across their three other hospitals in the towns of Ware, Gardner, and Athol. GVMC keeps its flagship campus largely untouched, allowing it to blend into its surroundings and still have room for future growth. GVMC returned the original hospital’s site to its natural state upon completion of the new hospital complex and protected the land.