Dam Foolishness

Raff Ellis grew up in Carthage, New York, a city tucked away in the Adirondack Mountains. Carthage reached its maturity in the late Nineteenth Century. After World War Two, it's industries moved south, the new freeways passed by, and its youth moved in search of work.

In these years, America's cities were growing more consolidated. The urban centers drew hordes of commuters every day and surrounded themselves with suburban housing and vast malls. Dwellers in the megalopolis turned prosperity into privacy, which could also be called disengagement and anonymity. Carthage was different. It remained quaint, even picturesque. No one had much money. Still, its people were known, interknit, and their lives together had an intensity that inspires the imagination many years later.

Carthage was unique. Yet its story—as conveyed in the recollections and the tales of Raff Ellis—is emblematic of widely shared experience.

Dam Foolishness sketches one place in the American land as a method of probing the American heart.