SUN JOURNAL • September 24, 2022
It smelled like “stagnation and death,” observer John Gould wrote. He called the Androscoggin of the 1950s “a reeking mess of filth and debris.” Decades in the making, the odors were a clear consequence of proliferating paper mills dumping a toxic stew into the once-pristine waters as well as growing communities pouring untreated waste directly from outlet pipes into the flowing current. It didn’t help that dams arose along the river where rocky rapids once existed to mix and purify the rushing waters. The result? The muck coating the river bottom, the floating scum on the surface, the chemicals, waste and bacteria in between all combined with summer’s low water levels and hot air to create an annual hazard that by the mid-1930s had become noxious.