Monticello's story begins with a 35,516-acre Mexican land grant called Rancho Las Putas, given in 1843 by Governor Manuel Micheltorena to Jose de los Reyes Berreyesa and Sexto Berelleza, members of the Berryessa family that would leave its name scattered across the region's geography. Putah Creek ran through the valley, and the grant encompassed a river basin that was fertile, sheltered, and remote. When California passed to the United States after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the Berreyesas filed their land claim with the Public Land Commission in their wives' names in 1852. The patent came through in 1863, by which time American settlers were already calling it Berryessa Ranch and buying parcels. A town grew up around the crossroads, where stagecoach horses were changed on the route from the quicksilver mines at Knoxville to Napa.

Monticello was never a glamorous place. It was a working town in a working valley, the kind of community where the post office opened in 1867 and kept running for nearly ninety years because people needed it. Ranchers raised cattle. Farmers tended orchards. The bridge across Putah Creek, well-engineered enough to survive the creek's annual winter floods, connected the town to the outside world. By the mid-twentieth century, Monticello had a mayor, a sense of permanence, and no idea that permanence was about to end. George C. Read served as mayor from 1945 to 1949 and later went on to serve in the Eisenhower administration as a deputy assistant secretary. The town he once governed would not survive the decade.

The Solano Irrigation District needed water for the Sacramento Valley's farms. Putah Creek would be dammed, and the Berryessa Valley would become a reservoir. The residents fought it. The nearby city of Winters, which stood to benefit from the project, opposed it too, out of loyalty to Monticello and the people who lived there. None of it mattered. Land purchases began in 1953, though landowners were allowed to stay until the water actually reached their property. Most of Monticello's residents left by the summer of 1956. After they were gone, crews moved in to deforest the valley, demolish the buildings, and relocate about 300 graves to higher ground. The town was erased before it was drowned.

Dorothea Lange had already made her name photographing the dispossessed. Her Migrant Mother remains one of the most recognized photographs in American history. When she and photographer Pirkle Jones were commissioned to document Monticello's death for Life magazine, the subject must have felt grimly familiar: ordinary people forced from their homes by forces larger than themselves. Lange and Jones captured the emptying streets, the abandoned structures, the faces of people leaving the only place they had known. Life never ran the piece. But Aperture magazine devoted an entire issue to the photojournalists' work, preserving in images what the reservoir was designed to erase. The photographs remain the most vivid record of a town that exists now only in memory and beneath 1.6 million acre-feet of water.

Lake Berryessa, California's seventh-largest man-made lake, now fills the valley where Monticello once stood. The water supplies agriculture across Solano County and generates hydroelectric power for the San Francisco Bay Area. The reservoir's famous Glory Hole spillway draws visitors when winter rains push the lake to capacity. Recreational boaters cross above streets they have never seen. The town's cemetery was moved, its buildings demolished, its orchards drowned. In dry years, when the lake level drops low enough, traces of Monticello's foundations sometimes emerge from the mud - concrete and stone that outlasted everything else, waiting for the water to fall low enough to remember.