George C. Ewing, a sales representative of Fairbanks and Co., marked part of what was then known as West Springfield, as a site for future development.

As recorded in Harper's Weekly, “The engineer took great pride in his work, and when it was finished, and the gates shut down, he is said to have irreverently exclaimed: ‘There!

Those gates are shut, and God Almighty himself can not open them!’” By noon the timber dam had sprung massive leaks, and the footing began to show signs of weakness at 2:00PM.

"[3] Writing in 1929, one Arthur E. Ferry recalled the scene as he had experienced it as a child-[3] “Some comical things happened on the day mentioned.

For instance: After the gates in the dam were closed, the water soon drained off from the river bed, and men and teams were in there getting out building stones, and many people were walking about, picking up shells and relics, until warning was shouted that they were in danger, and then there was a lively scramble to get to safety.

He was a portly man and came struggling and puffing up the bank, and seeing my father and Mr. Ebenezer Warner, he reached out his hands and cried frantically, ‘Devil, Devil, Warner, help me up!’ It was a frightful scene, with such an immense body of water full of timbers plunging down end over end, and people screaming with fright.

Initially built as effectively a wall of wooden timbers, concerns eventually arose that the water's velocity pouring over the dam was eroding the rocks upon which it stood, and it was described by a paper of the Engineers' Club of Philadelphia as "simply built with the wrong face up stream", where a sloping structure in the opposite direction would have been ideal.