East Branch Reservoir

About this Marker

The marker is recent — the product of a 2025 Eagle Scout project by Brewster High School senior Connor O’Reilly that included not only the marker itself but a digital collection on New York Heritage and an exhibit at the Southeast Museum in Brewster.

Construction of the East Branch Reservoir and Sodom Dam began in 1888 when the East Branch of the Croton River was diverted. The project was ambitious enough to attract national attention — the August 17, 1889 issue of Scientific American, published just three months after the catastrophic Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, featured the Sodom Dam on its cover and an engineering article by Harold Brown, C.E. framed explicitly as reassurance to an anxious public. Supervised by hydraulic engineers and employing cutting-edge technology, crews built stone retaining walls, culverts, bridges, and extensive rip-rap to prevent erosion, while a steel cable system transported massive stones across the construction area. The completed impoundment held 5.2 billion gallons of water and connected via a 1,773-foot tunnel to the neighboring Bog Brook Reservoir.

The human cost was not abstract. In fall 1889, a steel cable carrying platforms loaded with stone and cement snapped, sending a heavy cart crashing down and killing Rocco Giuseppe Pellettiere, a thirty-four-year-old Italian immigrant laborer who left a wife and two young children in Italy. On September 13, 1890, a violent storm struck the construction site, and a bolt of lightning hit a workers’ shelter near the Sodom Dam stone works, killing four men instantly — Nicolo Bellizza (17), Umberto Desantes (22), Bruno Butucci (44), and Antonio Gabrile (45). Two hearses made multiple trips to carry the men to a single grave at St. Lawrence O’Toole Catholic Cemetery in Brewster.

The reservoir came at a different kind of cost as well. 93 parcels totaling roughly 1,500 acres of the surrounding landscape were condemned by the City of New York; ninety-three parcels of farmland, mills, houses, a school, a church, and a natural lake (Mud Pond / Lake Kishawana) were taken. The neighboring community of Southeast Centre was the most directly affected — much of the working village was destroyed in the proceedings.

The marker reads “put in service in 1891”; the Aqueduct Commission’s own 1895 report gives the reservoir’s completion date as 1893. Both dates appear in the historical record. The total project cost for the East Branch and Bog Brook reservoirs was $1,981,658.