ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s often said that you don’t truly appreciate something until it’s gone.

For me, that “something” is village of Blue Marsh and the so-called Pleasant Valley along the course of the Tulpehocken Creek in western Berks County.

This tiny village and the valley surrounding it are gone because a dam was built that flooded the area in the late 1970s.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and into the first half of the 1970s, the coming Blue Marsh Dam construction assumed semi-mythical status. It was delayed again and again (I think it was called “Project ’70” at one point – as in, it would be done by 1970, which came and went without there seeming to be any progress).

As a kid, I barely recall visiting the hamlet – but I do remember going with my father to the Pleasant Valley Roller Mills, a massive structure with some parts of the building dating to the 1700s.

It was some years after the dam finally did flood the area that I became interested in genealogy and realized, to my chagrin, that several of my ancestral homesteads were now under the waters of the Blue Marsh Lake that the dam created.

The village and the valley stuck in my mind because there was so much of my family history there.

And so it was with great interest when I read recently that a couple who live in Sinking Spring had written and compiled Blue Marsh and the Pleasant Valley – One Last Look: A Pictorial Remembrance.

Paul L. Miller, who spent many summers in relatives’ bungalows in the Pleasant Valley, and his wife Kathleen A. Miller have captured these ghosts with photos covering decades of the village and valley’s homes, farms, mills and people.

While the photos – which included many taken by folks in the 1970s, right before many of the structures were stripped and demolished – were fascinating, the authors’ text was even more interesting to me.

Among the tidbits I learned about just my own ancestral families and circumstances: When State Route 183 was laid to straighten out a road leading northwest from Reading, it used the track bed of a failed railroad for some of its course. A William Spayd who was likely my ancestor was lock-tender for the Union Canal that paralleled the Tulpehocken Creek for much of the 1800s. There’s a “Dehart farm” mentioned that likely belonged to either relatives or direct-line ancestors of mine.

All in all, the Blue Marsh book has filled in many gaps from this part of childhood that I let slip away.

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The “collector’s limited edition” of the Blue Marsh book can be ordered for $59 if picked up at the authors’ home or $68 shipped by USPS mail. Make check payable to Paul L. Miller, 1100 Ruth St., Sinking Spring, Pa. 19608. Information: Call 610-678-4219.