Remembering Quabbin Reservoir advocate and photographer Les Campbell - MassLive.com
Generous. Humble. Kind. Soft-spoken.
David Campbell, of Belchertown, says he’s learned much about his father, Leslie “Les” Campbell, over the past six months since his death in September at the age of 95. The notes of condolence have flowed in with recollections of how Les Campbell had made an impact in the lives of many.
“As I go through his house every day, the common thread I find is he liked to share what he knew,” David Campbell says. “He was a teacher. There are a lot of things you could call him, but teacher may sum him up best.”
His father started sharing his love of birds, for instance, through photography, encouraging others to learn the art as he did over the course of many decades, earning many a national and regional award for his images. Photography also helped the elder Campbell focus on another love, the Quabbin Reservoir, the complicated history of how it came to be and its natural beauty.
The reservoir, but perhaps more importantly, the way in which its creation changed life forever in the Swift River valley of Western Massachusetts when it was built in the 1930s, proved a focal point in many facets of Les Campbell’s life.
In this photo from 2005, photographer Les Campbell prepares a photo exhibit on the history of the Quabbin Reservoir at his Sky Meadow homestead in Belchertown. He is holding a print of a photo of a local boy made about 1920 by photographer Burt V. Brooks. Brooks lived and worked at that time in Greenwich, one of the towns dismantled for the Quabbin. This print and others made around that time were printed from 5-by-7 inch glass plate negatives. (MICHAEL S. GORDON / THE REPUBLICAN FILE PHOTO)
The Quabbin was where he got his first job, washing dishes for workers there in the 1940s. He went on to a career as a laboratory technician, testing the quality of the water delivered daily for drinking to millions of homes in Greater Boston. It was where he lived in rented house on the reservoir grounds for more than 40 years.
And, it was the subject of countless exquisite photographs in which Campbell captured its wildlife and natural beauty.
“I think I’ve been one of the luckiest guys on the face of the Earth to have this kind of life,” Les Campbell told a reporter for The Republican in an interview in 1992. His mission, Campbell explained at the time, was to educate people “that we must keep (Quabbin) as it is, as a sanctuary for people, as well as wildlife…It would be so easy to destroy (its value) as a sanctuary.”
This photograph of a sparkling shoreline at Quabbin Reservoir is among the archive of images by photographer Les Campbell
Now, friends and admirers want to ensure Les Campbell and his second wife, Terry Ann Campbell, who died in 2004, are honored with naming of the Quabbin Visitor Center for them. It was the Campbells who worked tirelessly with the Friends of Quabbin group they founded to see the visitor center established in the mid-1980s. There, they organized groups and hosted events to introduce visitors to the Quabbin and its history.
A bill seeking the Legislature’s approval for the visitors center to carry the Campbells’ names was filed this month by state Sen. Anne P. Gobi, D-Spencer, with support from many of the Senate and House members from Western Massachusetts.
Gobi can remember first visiting the Quabbin as an elementary school student and going to the visitors’ center.
“You walk in, and you may not want to read everything, but you look at the pictures,” Gobi says. “That’s what is striking. It’s the photography that draws people in. Then, they learn the (Quabbin) story and what’s behind those photos. I am a former history teacher, and (understand) you need that link to the past. It’s extremely important to memorialize both Les and Terry-Ann in this way.”
The Quabbin Visitor Center is at the end of the Winsor Dam at the Quabbin Reservoir in Belchertown. State Sen. Anne Gobi has filed a bill seeking to name the center in honor of the late Les and Terry Ann Campbell who worked with the Friends of Quabbin to establish the center. (Don Treeger / The Republican) 2/23/2021
Gobi says she will push for the bill, once it receives a docket number and is assigned to a committee for review, to be fast-tracked in hopes its passage can coincide with plans by Campbell’s family and friends to have a memorial in May. “I know there’s not going to have any controversy about this,” the senator notes.
Already, multiple groups, from the Friends of the Quabbin to many photography organizations which Campbell either helped found or belonged to, are rallying community support of the legislation.
Stephen M. Brewer, Gobi’s predecessor as senator for the Worcester, Hampden, Hampshire & Middlesex District that includes the bulk of the Quabbin and its watershed’s 25,000 acres, describes Les Campbell succinctly: “He was the eyes of Quabbin.”
Like Campbell, Brewer grew up the environs of what would become the Quabbin – Campbell in Ware and Brewer in Barre, where he’s lived his entire life. Their lives were intermingled with those of people whose families once lived and died in the towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott, the remains of which now lie beneath the pristine waters of the reservoir.
Brewer will go so far as to say, “The state stole that land from the residents of the Swift River valley.” Thus, the passionate response of people like Campbell to preserve the legacy of the towns lost to its creation, he explains.
“(Les) pushed senators like me and Bob Wetmore before me to make sure that sacred ground, paid for with huge amount of sacrifice from people, was protected,” Brewer says. “Imagine it if you were just home from World War I and you’d survived the gas of the war in France. Your family’s been in Dana or Greenwich for past 100 years, and the state says you have to leave. And, by the way, ‘We’re digging granny up in the cemetery, and she’s out of here, too.’ There were 39 cemeteries where the Quabbin is now. It was visceral to Les and to me, and I didn’t live it. I always carried that into the Statehouse with me.”
As he talks of his late friend, Brewer intersperses his comments with recollections of Campbell photographs, one showing an overlook of Ware from Route 9 as the town is enveloped in fog. “Les was as fine a nature photographer as you would find,” Brewer says.
In the music barn the senator built in retirement and where he goes often to play his banjo, Brewer keeps several Campbell photographs, one of them a portrait of the town of Greenwich, superimposed on the body of water in which it was swallowed.
“Spring Vista,” of birches framing Quabbin Resevoir, is one of Les Campbell’s most well-recognized photographs. (LES CAMPBELL / LESCAMPBELLPHOTOGRAPHY.COM)
“Les really was extraordinarily creative,” says the retired senator, added that Campbell and the Friends of Quabbin group “humanized” the history of the reservoir for those not familiar with it. “It won’t be long before no one is left who lived and can tell those stories,” Brewer says. “When people forget the sacrifice that was made, it could become a problem. If you did not protect the Quabbin, you’d have to put in a water plant.”
Like Brewer, former Senate president Stanley C. Rosenberg, of Amherst, had a decades-long friendship with the Campbells. He recalls first meeting Les Campbell while working at the University of Massachusetts Extension Service in the 1970s when Campbell inquired about starting an arts council in Belchertown.
Rosenberg remembers Campbell’s work illuminating people about Quabbin’s history with presentations of his photographs on large screens, accompanied by music by Belchertown’s high school students.
“His commitment to preserving the history, the beauty and meaning of the Quabbin was just legendary,” Rosenberg says. “He had a very big personality and was a very persuasive man. He was always the front man, but Terry was always there. She’d quietly inject her ideas and thoughts.”
Rosenberg, who treasures two Campbell photographs in his home, feels the couple’s sustained service as volunteers to the commonwealth are worthy of recognition. “I think it would be wonderful to recognize (the Campbells’) decades of commitment to the Quabbin and to its protection and the appropriate sharing of the Quabbin. Through his photographs, he was bringing people to the site, encouraging people to come but not mess it up. Let’s not keep it a secret, Les would say. Let’s have people learn the history and enjoy the beauty.”
Brewer knows a bit about having things named in someone’s honor. One the three public boat ramps at the Quabbin, situated in Hardwick, carries his own name. Recalling that ceremony, he says, “I was moved beyond belief. Four generations earlier, two miles from that boat ramp is where my immigrant relatives came from county Cork in Ireland to settle on Greenwich Plains Road in Hardwick.”
The senator says he thinks his old friend might well feel the same about having the visitors center carry the Campbell name. “Deep down he’d love it. Les was just a guy who cared about nature.”
Cynthia G. Simison is executive editor of The Republican. She may be reached by email to csimison@repub.com.
2021-02-28 10:03:12Z
https://www.masslive.com/living/2021/02/remembering-quabbin-reservoir-advocate-and-photographer-les-campbell.html
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