Presumpscot River: Westbrook to Casco Bay

By Tom Bell

Find more paddles

Reader Reviews

Paddle name: Presumpscot River: Westbrook to Casco Bay Nearest town: Westbrook Region: Greater Portland Water type: River/Bay Difficulty: Adv. Beginner Length: 7.9 miles Put-in: At the railroad bridge in downtown Westbrook on Cottage Street, off of Route 25. (You'll need to spot a car near the put-in.) Take-out: On the Portland side of Martin Point Bridge; there is a path that runs up from the water on your right as you enter the bay. (You'll need to spot a car at the take-out. There is a small turnoff just before the bridge as you take Route 1 out of Portland.) Other: There are multiple portages along this route, one of which is 3/4 mile long. This river can run low in warmer months, so check levels before you head out. Want more? See the first leg of the trip, Sebago to Westbrook Maps: Get driving directions from MapQuest. View a topo map from Maptech MapServer. Staff photo by John Ewing Reporter Tom Bell looks across at Westbrook's Dana Warp Mill while nearing Saccarappa Falls on the Presumpscot River by canoe View a slide show of photos from the trip. (14 photos)

The two boys standing in the doorway gave a yell that could be heard across the river.

"Keep the dam!" they shouted, before disappearing behind a closed door.

A dock — their swimming platform — floated on the Presumpscot River in front of their yard. If the Little Falls Dam were removed, the dock would be sitting on mud this time of year.

As photographer John Ewing and I continued our journey down the Presumpscot, from Sebago Lake to Portland, it became obvious that the river has different constituencies.

A dam acts as a brake on the river's movement to the sea. Slowed down, the river becomes warmer and deeper. Native cold-water fish can't survive long in the Presumpscot today, except in the river's cooler headwaters.

But the electricity from the dams' hydropower stations allow the Sappi mill in Westbrook to stay competitive with other mills, Sappi officials say, protecting the jobs of the 500 people who work there.

A "controlled" Presumpscot is also more predictable. In dry months, the dams retain enough water so people can go swimming and boating in places that would otherwise be dry.

The boys, who lived on the Gorham side of the river, had aimed their shouts at their Windham-side neighbor, Will Plumley, who was paddling downriver in a canoe. Plumley is one of the leaders of Friends of the Presumpscot, the advocacy group that wants to remove three of the river's nine dams.

Plumley, who is also an employee of the Blethen Maine Newspapers, had been talking to me about how the dam impoundments — the water backed up behind each dam — undercut the shoreline.

"They don't realize that the impoundment is taking their land away from them," Plumley said of the boys. "They haven't figure that out yet."

We saw the conflict again farther downriver at the Saccarappa Falls in Westbrook. A group of teen-age boys were taking full advantage of the hydroelectric dam. From a height of about 20 feet, they were leaping off a concrete embankment into a deep, fast-moving channel behind the dam.

Looking out her office window on the fifth floor of the nearby Dana Warp Mill, Nancy Sosman could hear the boys hit the water. She could also see an old tire sitting in the middle of the rock ledge that was part of the natural falls, now dry because so much water was being diverted to the hydroelectric plant.

Removing the dam would improve the value of the renovated mill, because the natural river would be more scenic than a dam, said Sosman, who works as the art director of a company that prints designs on T-shirts.

The river's constituencies can change their positions over time, just as the river itself has changed. During the last stretch, from Westbrook to Casco Bay, the river is vastly cleaner than it was 30 years ago or even two years ago.

During our portage around the falls, we met Arthur Gordon, 77, who worked for 38 years at S.D. Warren, Sappi's predecessor.

He told us that the worst pollution occurred during the 1950s and '60s, when the river below the mill was often covered with foam.

"If you had a beer like that," he said, holding his hands a foot apart to show the foam's thickness, "you'd be happy." Two college students who motored from S.D. Warren to the Smelt Hill Dam in a dinghy in 1969 reported seeing gas bubbling from the river bottom and a substance like "old-fashioned egg cartons" hanging from bushes along the banks. Even the logs and leaves were black, they told the Portland Evening Express.

While the city's mills exploited the river, downtown merchants ignored it. They built their shops facing away from it and paved the land along its banks for parking lots.

But the old mills, except for Sappi, are gone. In the 1970s, Sappi and the city of Westbrook installed treatment plants. Two years ago, Sappi closed its pulp operation, drastically reducing the amount of discharged chemicals and organic material, which uses up oxygen as it decays.

The city of Westbrook — which has long turned its back on the river — now hopes to turn the Presumpscot into a municipal centerpiece. Officials are planning a waterfront promenade linking both banks, and they are designing a path that will travel along the river from Sappi to the Route 302 bridge.

But while the lower river may be cleaner today, that's only relative to a truly awful past. In truth, the river still looks dirty. In Westbrook, fallen tree limbs served as booms to catch floating trash. Our portage around the Saccarappa Falls took us down Main Street, and we slipped the canoe into water behind a parking lot, next to a submerged shopping cart.

For 7.9 miles, from Westbrook to tidewater, the Presumpscot River is not safe for swimming, according to a state water quality assessment. The reason: During heavy rainfalls, five storm water pipes dump diluted sewage directly into the river. The pipes are located between the Sappi mill and Bridge Street, which is the area that city officials want to turn into their centerpiece. The city has been working with some success for the last few years to separate storm water from sewage flow and plans to finish the job over the next several years. We had hoped to canoe the river in a single day but jettisoned that idea by the time we got to downtown Westbrook. While we still had time to reach Casco Bay, we feared fighting both darkness and the incoming tide in the estuary.

We also needed some rest before we tackled our longest portage — a three-quarter-mile hike around the 190-acre Sappi property. The mill was built right on top of the river, so there's no easy way around it.

The following morning, as we hauled the canoe down Warren Avenue toward the river access near Gate 9, we endured shouts of "Where's the water?" from passing motorists.

The dam at Sappi is not a hydroelectric dam, so the federal government doesn't regulate it. Unless a fish ladder is built here, there's no reason to create fish passage upriver. River advocates say the state could force Sappi to build a fish ladder, but Sappi contends the state doesn't have that authority.

The river looks different below the Sappi mill than above it. The gates of the Smelt Hill Dam in Falmouth are now open during the summer months, and the river flows at its natural pace and volume, which is slow and low.

Within a few minutes, we passed the milky plume from Sappi's treatment plant. Two years ago, before the pulp mill and Sappi's black liquor evaporators were shut down, the plume was dark.

Just before we reached the Route 302 bridge, we saw a string of fish traps that had been set by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. Biologists are trapping suckers and bass to find out what kind of toxic chemicals are in the river.

Just two years ago, biologists struggled for weeks to catch the five bass required for the study. Now they can catch more than 20 bass in a single day. They recently caught a fish they suspect is a wild Atlantic salmon.

The stretch between the Sappi mill and the Smelt Hill Dam is the most undeveloped section of the river. We didn't see a single house. Nobody wanted to live next a river that gave off hydrogen sulfide fumes so noxious they would discolor houses and cause their occupants to gag for air.

At one point we entered a gorge surrounded by white pines and big-toothed aspen, as well as birch and mountain ash. This was the most beautiful part of our entire journey. Here, right in the city limits of Portland, we found the kind of solitude that people in big cities drive for hours to reach.

This is the land that Portland's Landbank Commission is recommending that the City Council acquire to create a new park. The property's owners, though, propose building a 27-lot subdivision, called Presumpscot River Place III.

Officials envision a boat launch at the site, which would allow canoeists and kayakers to paddle all the way to Casco Bay. The only obstacle, the Smelt Hill Dam downstream in Falmouth, is scheduled to be removed next summer.

City officials and the landowners in recent months have been trying to negotiate a deal that could preserve part of the site while still allowing the subdivision to go forward.

About 3,000 feet below the site are Presumpscot Falls, upon which the the Smelt Hill Dam was built.

This is ground zero for industrial Maine. The state's first mill, a grist mill, was built here in 1646. The state's first paper mill and sawmills were built here in 1732, and so was the state's first hydroelectric dam, in 1889.

A flood in 1996 destroyed the dam's ability to produce power. The owners, Central Maine Power, have decided to sell it to the state so it can be torn down.

Removing the dam, including the purchase price, is expected to cost $1 million. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will pay 65 percent of the cost; the state and local conservation groups would pay 35 percent.

Pat Keliher, president of Coastal Conservation Association of Maine, met us at the bridge just below the dam. He said the dam's removal will allow more bait fish, like American shad and blueback herring, to travel upriver, and that will bring larger fish, like striped bass.

The dam's removal will also help the river flush itself of pollutants, he said.

"When you take out a constriction and restore it to its natural state," he said, "that can only be good for the river."

On the outgoing tide, we canoed to the mouth of the river and paddled across the rich, shallow estuary, which today supports an enormous variety of shore birds and marine life. We saw hordes of tiny plovers poking at the mudflats for the small invertebrates that form their diet. A snowy egret, with beautiful curved plumage on its back, rested on a moored boat. An osprey hovered over the water, obviously on the hunt for fish.

Thirty-eight years ago, the U.S. Public Health Service called the estuary a "giant cesspool." The agency proposed damming it to cover the stinking mudflats with water. It also suggested either removing all the mud or piling dirt on it.

In the 1960s and '70s, sewage, chemicals and pulp fibers would collect on the flats and rot. To control the rotten-egg stench, S.D. Warren in 1960 started dropping lime pellets from helicopters. In one month alone in 1965, the company bombarded the estuary with 30 tons of pellets.

Aerial photo in 1963 showed a light-colored cloud of waste flowing from the mouth of the Presumpscot. The plume would then pass under Martin's Point Bridge and continue into Casco Bay. Even until the late 1990s, particularly after heavy rains, boaters as far away at Fort Gorges could see and smell the river.

Sen. Edmund Muskie in 1965 told President Lyndon Johnson's Pollution Control Advisory Board that the Presumpscot's problems were so great that probably only new federal policies could address them. That year, the president's advisers toured the Warren plant, the river and estuary.

Muskie would become instrumental in the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act — the foundation for environmental cleanup of not only the Presumpscot River but rivers across the nation.

We climbed onto the mudflats near Martin Point, where one of the president's men 36 years ago whiffed the breeze and pronounced, "It's a stinking river you've got here." And we dragged our canoe to shore, ending our journey down a little river, just 25 miles long, that is as deep in history as any in America.

And we rested, filling our lungs with the cool, salty air.