Run Chamberlain Run!  Solving the 200-year-old Mystery of Runaway Pond, by Dennis D. Chamberlain.  Mount Olympus Publishing Company.  142 pages.  $12.95.

Reviewed by Tena Starr

Glover isn't a very big town — at last count its population was just under 1,000.  But it does have at least one big claim to fame:  Runaway Pond.  It could well be the only town in Vermont that managed to flood itself and its neighbors in a drought year and accidentally, but nonetheless permanently, empty a 100-foot-deep lake.

Runaway Pond, which is no longer a pond, lake, or any other kind of body of water, was called Long Pond back in 1810.  It was about a mile and a half long, half a mile wide, and on average, 80 to 100 feet deep, about 150 feet deep at its center.

Two hundred years ago, with help from the local miller and about 50 of his friends and customers, it "ran away."  Today, it's an unremarkable, brushy tract of land, unrecognizable as its former self except for a granite monument at a small rest area that commemorates its long ago existence.

Here is the story, as it's most commonly told.  This abbreviated account comes from E.T.Wilson (unrelated to the gristmill owner who was the architect of the venture), who wrote it in 1890.

Aaron Willson of Glover owned a gristmill, but was struggling.  After two dry years, water levels were low, and he was troubled about lack of water power.  For some time, he'd mulled over the notion that if he cut a channel into Long Pond, about five miles south of the village, he could increase water flow into Mud Pond and subsequently increase the flow of water to his mill.

On June 6, 1810, Mr. Willson and 50 or 60 helpers who ground grain at his mill headed out to Long Pond with shovels, planning to dig a channel about 20 rods (about five and a half yards) long.  They finished in early afternoon, drank a little whiskey, and sat down on the bank to have lunch and watch the water flow.

What they didn't know was that a crust of clay a few inches thick had formed over a layer of the quicksand on the entire inside of the pond, and that's what had kept the water in place all those years.

Soon, the celebrating men noticed that the water stopped flowing through the ditch.  "a deep, heavy rumbling sound was heard, and the hill on which they stood began to tremble as though shaken from some cause underneath," Mr. Wilson reported.  "This seemed to increase quite fast when one of their number, Spencer Chamberlain, jumped into the ditch to discover the cause.  Instantly, as the bottom began to sink under him, he shouted for help and one of the party reached down and caught him by the hair of the head and drew him from the channel, which began to deepen and widen very rapidly.  Large pieces of earth from either side with trees standing began to slide in, throwing up great sheets of water above their heads.

"All were much frightened.  One of them afterward said:  'We were too much dazed to comprehend what was passing before us.  The land and trees seemed to be moving away or plunging into the deep chasm, where large trees would be broken with a sharp report distinctly heard above the great noise of the water.  The whole forest seemed to be whirling around us and sinking with the pond.'  The ground on which they stood began to move when the spell was broken and all ran for higher ground.

"Mr. Willson was the first to speak:  'My God, what will become of my wife?'"

What happened next is the subject of Dennis Chamberlain's book and the part of the story that some suspect is more legend than fact.  There's no doubt that Long Pond vanished that day, and it's likely that someone did manage to run ahead of the water for five miles and save Mr. Willson's wife, who was running the gristmill.  The big question is who?

According to much oral history and Glover tradition, that man was Spencer Chamberlain, who was 25 years old, over six feet tall, a great wrestler and runner — and half Indian.  Mr. Wilson's account of what happened has the mill owner starting off at a run to save his wife.  "A few others started out also, but soon came back, finding themselves wholly unequal to the undertaking," Mr. Wilson wrote.  A number now cried, "run Chamberlain run!'"

And run he did, keeping to the high ground and racing the water, which sometimes got jammed up behind the fallen trees and mounds of earth that fell before it; and sometimes was a wall of water 70 feet high.

He reached the mill with seconds to spare and rescued the miller's terrified wife, but the mill itself and a horse were washed away.  The water roared on, through Barton, all the way to Lake Memphremagog.

That's the story of Runaway Pond, as it's traditionally been told, written about, and re-enacted in a show by the Bread and Puppet Theater of Glover.

But Jack Sumberg of Glover, who has a blog about Runaway Pond called Runaway Ponders, wondered.  In 2009, he wrote Dennis Chamberlain, a great-great-great grandson of Spencer Chamberlain, expressing doubts and asking for more information.  Mr. Sumberg said his goal was not to unseat Spencer Chamberlain as the hero of the day; it was to investigate all accounts of what really happened on June 6, 1810.

His query inspired Dennis Chamberlain's book, which does take a look, from various views and points in time, at many accounts of that day — among them the assertion that it was not Spencer Chamberlain who made the famous run that day, but Solomon Dorr, the mill-owner's son-in-law.  Mr. Dorr would have had motivation since his young sons were often at the mill and would have been drowned by the flood.

At one time, the story was advanced that it wasn't Mr. Willson at all who let Runaway Pond loose, but a group of fishermen on a lark.

I won't say what Mr. Chamberlain's conclusion is.  However, he does note that some of the men involved in the Runaway Pond debacle left town to avoid threatened legal action.

He also suggests that some might not, at the time, have wanted to give a man who was half Indian credit for being the hero of the day.

Mr. Sumberg advances another theory:  Perhaps both men made the run, he said.  And surely Glover could make room for two heroes.

This coming weekend Glover will celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Long Pond's extinction and Mr. Chamberlain's — or Mr. Dorr's — famous run.