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history lesson: The history behind current events.

Watershed MomentThe death of a Montana dam.

By Caitlin DeSilvey
Posted Thursday, April 17, 2008, at 7:13 AM ET

Click here to read a slide show on the passing of Milltown.On March 28 in Milltown, Mont., the waters of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers breached a coffer dam to flow freely through their confluence for the first time in a century. The moment came at the midpoint of a $100 million Superfund cleanup of contaminated sediments at the Milltown Reservoir—perhaps the most ambitious environmental remediation project ever attempted in the country. When the cleanup began in 2006, a Slate slide show looked at the history of the dam and the memories attached to the landscape it created.

Click here to read a follow-up slide-show essay on the passing of Milltown.

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Caitlin DeSilvey's work on Milltown is supported by a fellowship from Humanities Montana. She is a lecturer in cultural geography at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, England.
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