It’s down there. Beneath the placid sheen of Loch Raven Reservoir, entombed by 45 feet of water, lie the ruins of the town of Warren.

Flooded by engineers a century ago, in a bid to boost the supply of drinking water to a burgeoning Baltimore City, Warren today is an afterthought, if recalled at all, by residents near Cockeysville in Baltimore County. The doomed hamlet’s skeletal remains — craggy foundations of the homes and shops that marked the bustling mill town for more than 150 years — are hidden reminders of the sacrifices made by Warren’s 900 inhabitants when the floodgates opened in 1922, and 23 million gallons of water poured in.

At the time, The Sun recorded the locals’ angst.

“Well, it’s pretty hard to drown a fellow out like that,” said John Bull, a longtime resident. “I’ve been living in Warren for 60 years and many of my friends and relatives are buried here. It seems hard to be driven out by water like a rat out of a hole.”

Warren’s roots harked back to 1750, when the first grist mills were built on the banks of the Gunpowder River. The town evolved around the mills and, by the late 1800s, it was a hub of activity, boasting cotton and flour industries and more than 100 homes for the blue-collar workers who lived there. It was, by all accounts, a typical manufacturing town of the times, with three churches, a post office, a two-room schoolhouse, a library, a gymnasium and a general store. A cemetery sat on a knoll overlooking Warren and its people.

At times, the locals bowed to the river that powered the mills. In 1868, a flooded Gunpowder swept away two homes and a blacksmith shop. A year later, another flood dislodged a bridge and carried it downstream, where the debris damaged yet another bridge.

As early as 1872, the Gunpowder was seen as a source of potable water for Baltimore. A small dam, built in 1881, was soon outgrown. After years of hemming and hawing, a larger dam was constructed, with Warren directly in its path. In 1922, the town was sold by the mills’ owners to the city for $1 million, and Warren’s fate was sealed.

A modern Atlantis, it would be.

Residents, some in their 90s, were ordered to leave. Tears were shed, buildings were torn down, or dynamited, with the lumber, stone and metal used for scrap. Chronicling the demolition, The Sun surmised the future:

“As the wreckers are departing with window sashes and wood, stone and bricks … the floodgates will be loosed and Baltimore’s drinking water will come in with a roar, with trees, splinters and maybe a baby’s high chair or two tossing in the swirling, boiling current. Then all will be silent again and a broad river will be flowing, 45 feet deep, where boys played marbles and girls rolled hoops.”

By the end of 1922, Warren was off the grid. Its last known resident, Florence Eichler, died in 2006 at age 103.

Through the years, it is said, during long summer droughts, bits of the town’s underpinnings have been seen peering through the waters of the reservoir, like some Loch Raven monster. In 1978, scuba divers — inspired, perhaps, by Jacques Cousteau — set out to locate the lost town. Their efforts were for naught; Warren was buried under nearly 30 feet of silt, the runoff from decades of storms.

In 1922, The Sun offered up the town’s epitaph:

“Yet for 100 years to come, men will remember that at the bottom of a 45-foot lake, a thriving settlement of mill workers once answered the factory whistle in the mornings, went to church, sent the youngsters to school, quarreled, voted, loved and died. After that, memories will grow dimmer; the story that church bells once rang there, under the water, may be scoffed at as idle fiction.”

Have a news tip? Contact Mike Klingaman at jklingaman@baltsun.com and 410-332-6456.