Water Closet for December 12, 2014

From Mass Moments of 12/1/14*

December 1, 1826, the Barnet, the first steamboat to operate on the Connecticut River, passed through the South Hadley Canal on its way to Vermont. For centuries, despite waterfalls along the way, New England’s longest river had served as a major transportation route. In the late 1700s, increasing industrialization along the Connecticut motivated businessmen to build the country’s first navigational canal at South Hadley to avoid the expense of portage. It opened in 1795, followed by the Turners Falls Canal three years later. The two canals increased river traffic to its peak. Stiff competition from the railroads in the 1840s brought the Connecticut’s role as a highway to an end. The last boat passed through the South Hadley Canal in 1863.
The Connecticut River flows 405 miles from northern New Hampshire, along the New Hampshire-Vermont border, through western Massachusetts and the center of Connecticut before emptying into Long Island Sound near Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
For centuries (probably millennia) Native American peoples flourished in the area, fishing, trading, and cultivating the fertile soil. The river served as a mighty highway, connecting different tribes.
In 1636 William Pynchon, an ambitious Puritan businessman, purchased land from the Agawam nation and founded Springfield, the first English town on the Massachusetts Colony side of the Connecticut. Over the course of the seventeenth century, colonists settled further and further up river, founding Northampton in 1654, Hadley in 1661, and Deerfield and Northfield in 1673. The Indians were driven ever further north.
English colonists used the Connecticut River as their primary transportation route just as the native people had, but there were problems. A vessel leaving Long Island Sound could only navigate the first 60 miles. Beginning with rapids in Enfield, Connecticut, it would encounter a series of natural barriers. The most daunting were the Great Falls in South Hadley. Draft horses or oxen could pull flat-bottomed boats over the Enfield rapids, but the 50-foot drop at South Hadley was a different matter. There, and again upriver at Turners Falls, cargo had to be removed from the boats and, loaded onto wagons, driven around the falls, and re-loaded onto boats – a time consuming and expensive proposition.
In the decades after the Revolution, some of the country’s first industrial ventures, such as the Federal armory at Springfield, were built along the Connecticut. Determined to improve their access to distant markets, in 1792 local merchants, politicians, and officials in western Massachusetts launched a canal building project in South Hadley. Three years later, the first boat used the new canal to bypass the Great Falls.
The engineering involved was impressive. A sloping 275-foot ramp led from the river into the canal. Boats were loaded onto a huge cart with rear wheels that were taller than the front ones, making it possible for the boat to sit level. Then heavy chains were attached to massive wheels, powered by the river, which pulled the cart and boat up the ramp to the canal. The sight was so novel that crowds gathered to watch.

The Connecticut was once a river of numerous fish and Native American canoes from now Canada to the sea. Twelve times the length of our Ipswich River, three times longer than the Mighty Merrimack, and like the latter polluted by industry, now both are relatively clean again. – Christopher Chan photo

A system of five locks replaced the stone ramp in 1805, and traffic continued to increase. The canal in South Hadley opened in 1795 and the one in Turners Falls opened in 1798 which stimulated the local economy so much that in 1810 the population of the Connecticut River Valley had doubled. In 1826 the 75-foot steam-powered Barnet ushered in a new era. For the next 15 years, fleets of steamboats transported thousands of tons of freight and hundreds of passengers up and down the Connecticut. Even when the railroads became a more cost effective alternative to water transport, the river remained a keystone in the region’s economy. By the end of the nineteenth century, a variety of factories, including cotton and paper mills and a plant that manufactured textile machinery, lined the banks of the Connecticut. Industrialists used the Connecticut, as they did other rivers, like the Blackstone and Merrimack to dispose of waste products. The water became so polluted that most fish could not survive.

This began to change in the late 1960s and 1970s when many companies closed or relocated their factories. The passage of the Federal Clean Water Act in 1972 brought about a slow but steady improvement in the water quality of the Connecticut River. Stocks of American shad, eel, and sea lamprey have rebounded. The building of structures that allow fish to bypass dams and the raising and releasing of Atlantic salmon hasn’t yet been successful for salmon. 200 hundred years ago they came each year in great numbers to spawn (MST added this update on salmon.)
A historically important transportation route that turned into a polluted waterway, the Connecticut River is now one of the state’s premier recreation areas, and the electric plants along its length continue to be major providers of power for the region.

Links:
A brief history of the Connecticut River http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/conn.river/history.html
A brief history of the South Hadley Canal http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/conn.river/.html
Sources:
The Connecticut, by Walter Hard (Massachusetts Audubon Society, 1998).
Springfield 1636-1986, ed. by Michael F. Konig and Martin Kaufman (Springfield Library and Museum Association, 1987).
* Online at http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=345
The Middleton Stream Team recommends: The Founding Fish, 2003, by famous nonfiction writer John McPhee. He writes of the history of shad in our East Coast’s rivers. Research in the Connecticut River is much mentioned. Shad were once in great numbers in our Ipswich and Merrimack rivers.

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WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION
FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD

Ipswich R. Flow Rate (S. Middleton USGS Gage) in Cubic Feet/ Second (CFS):
For Dec 9, 2014 Normal . . . 59 CFS Current Rate . . . Unavailable

*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton is the source for actual precipitation data thru Nov.

**Middleton Stream Team is source of actual precipitation data for Dec..
Normals data is from the National Climatic Data Center.
THE WATER CLOSET is provided by the Middleton Stream Team: www.middletonstreamteam.org or <MSTMiddletonMA@gmail.com> or (978) 777-4584

Featured Photo credit: Jeanette Runyon via photopin cc