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‘Take It Down and They’ll Return’: The Stunning Revival of the Penobscot River
About a week before the removal of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Old Town‚ Maine‚ Dan Kusnierz dragged his sons to the riverside to take their picture in front of the aging structure. They had just come from a little league game. “They were being goofy and didn’t understand it‚” Kusnierz‚ the water resources program manager for the Penobscot Indian Nation‚ recalls. It was 2012‚ and with the dam’s removal imminent‚ the river — New England’s second-largest — was about to transform.Â
For nearly two centuries‚ the Penobscot had been choked with logs and pulp as the timber and paper industries — both long-standing cornerstones of Maine’s economy — used it both as a lumber byway and waste receptacle. From just 1830 to 1880‚ more than eight billion feet of timber floated down the river. To power all this industry‚ dams were erected‚ 119 in the Penobscot River Basin alone. Two in particular‚ the Great Works and the Veazie‚ posed an outsized threat to the river’s health.Â
A stereograph from the 1870s shows the view from Ripogenus Falls on the Penobscot River. Credit: A.L. Hinds / Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art‚ Prints and Photographs‚ New York Public Library
Perhaps irrelevant to his children posing for a picture at the time‚ Kusnierz‚ who is not Penobscot but has served the Nation for 20 years‚ was one the members of an unprecedented coalition of scientists‚ Indigenous people and conservationists working to remove both dams in order to free the Penobscot River and hopefully restore its health in the process.
The river had been sick for generations. Butch Phillips‚ a Penobscot Nation elder‚ recalls growing up on Indian Island‚ the Penobscot tribe reservation located near Old Town on the river‚ in the 1950s. By that time‚ the Penobscot was unrecognizable to the body of water it had once been‚ with drifting logs so gridlocked at times on the eastern side of the island that the river was impassable for boats and people alike. This posed an ongoing dilemma for the Penobscot people who‚ prior to the construction of a bridge in 1950‚ used canoes to travel to and from the mainland.Â
The Veazie Dam before removal. Credit: Joshua Royte / The Nature Conservancy
Despite the discharge coming from the mills‚ the river was still central to the Penobscot Nation’s everyday life. “[The river] was our playground‚” Phillips says. “We were either canoeing on it‚Â fishing‚ swimming in it and in the wintertime we were skating on it.” But the relationship had been affected. Living so closely with a body of water like the Penobscot for so many generations‚ he explained‚ “you develop a river culture. We are river people‚ we’re canoe people. And when you take away that element‚ that river and the use of the river‚ then you take away the culture as well.”
One of the worst blows to the river‚ though‚ was to its 12 species of sea-run fish. The Great Works‚ Veazie and Howland dams‚ all built in the 19th century‚ severed access to the river’s headwaters‚ which fish like alewives and shad‚ shortnose sturgeon and Atlantic salmon used as spawning ground. When the dams were erected‚ the effects on the fish population were almost immediate: By the 1850s‚ salmon no longer inhabited most of the rivers in southern Maine and their populations continued to decline so dramatically that in 1889‚ the US government opened the Craigbrook National Fish Hatchery in Orland‚ Maine to support the besieged fish. For the next 50 years‚ it was the primary source of salmon eggs for the region.
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