The earthen dam was constructed between 1933 and 1935 under the supervision of the North Atlantic Division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, with a height of 65 feet and a length of 1460 feet at its crest.
Construction was done almost entirely with hand labor by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
[2] The Corps of Engineers designed the dam in response to a 1927 flood, which set state records and hit the Winooski River Valley and its tributaries the hardest.
Eighty-four people died as a result of the flood statewide, and the downtown of Barre, Vermont, was decimated.
[4] Although the dammed area has a maximum capacity of 23,550 acre-feet, it is normally empty.