SUN JOURNAL • September 24, 2022
Over the course of a lifetime, the 164-mile Androscoggin went from a fish-filled, pristine body of free-flowing water to a river choked with dams and increasingly treated like an open sewer from New Hampshire to Merrymeeting Bay. For the most part, nobody took much notice of it. Ever-more dams, a growing number of industries that poured an ever-larger amount of waste into the current and a rising population that ultimately required sewer lines that for decades simply deposited community wastewater directly into the river. The river’s quality degraded to a degree almost unimaginable today, followed by a half-century of much stricter environmental regulation has helped begin to restore the river.