The residents of a small pastoral town in Australia were warned by a government engineer to get rid of a whole building, just in time, a few months before it was drowned by a wall of water. It was no rogue attack or plot from a disaster movie, but this was what happened to a town called Adaminaby nestled in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, in the middle of the 1950s. Over one hundred buildings, two of which were churches, were physically moved up a hill and reconstructed, one brick at a time, to keep a community alive as their valley flooded. According to Heritage NSW's records, 102 buildings were moved between 1956 and 1957, prior to the damming of the Eucumbene River forming Lake Eucumbene. It is like a legend, but unfortunately, it is all true.
A dam that was so big that a whole new town was needed
The move was not a local initiative by a few individuals. It was a by-product of one of the greatest engineering schemes of the 20th century, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. As per the National Museum of Australia's Defining Moments archive, the scheme was constructed between 1949 and 1972, and saw about 100,000 workers from over 30 countries producing 16 dams and seven power stations. Eucumbene Dam, built across the Eucumbene River, was the largest of those dams and created Lake Eucumbene, the biggest and thirstiest reservoir in the whole scheme, and Old Adaminaby sat right in the middle of where that reservoir would fill in.
