Winning the Right to Pollute

Remains of old transportation canal in Manchester. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

Where I’m standing is just off the Amoskeag Bridge in Manchester. From here, it’s easy to see what the river once meant to this state. There’s the line of old mill buildings running along the bank. Those mill jobs depended on the river. In front of us, there’s the dam. The river was power. To the left, you can see the ruins of an old canal. The river meant transportation. The only thing you can’t see is a sewer pipe, but the river also meant waste disposal.

In the 1800’s, the river was at the center of the economy. Today, it isn’t.

CUT: Stu “We drive over it today and think nothing of it.”

That was Stu Wallace, an historian. At one point or another as I worked on this project, I heard the same opinion from just about everyone. The river is just there and its legacy is so plain to see, and so in the past, it hardly seems relevant. But in a way, what we see on the surface hides a deeper story that is very much with us today. As it turns out, the river was the proving ground for an entity that sprang up in many places in America in the mid-1800’s. It’s an entity we take for granted today but did not exist before the mills and the legal battles they fought. It’s the modern corporation.

The story starts in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830’s.
SFX LOOMS

The Boote Mill in Lowell. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

The weaving room at the Boote Mill represented an major leap forward in industrial efficiency.

CUT TESS We have roughly 90 looms, you’re hearing 25 running.

Our guide at the Lowell National Historical Park is Ranger Tess Shatzer.

CUT TESS You’re hearing just a fraction of the noise that a mill worker would have heard every day for 10-12 hours.

It takes a moment to wrap your brain around the amount of energy on display here. A forest of thick leather belts to power the looms reach up to the high ceiling. They connect to a spinning shaft that runs the length of this long hall. That shaft ultimately connects to a turbine in the basement. All this spinning, all the clatter and rattle, it was all powered by the river. Shatzer says each piece was part of a plan by the investors that was larger than anyone could guess.

CUT TESS they knew what they wanted to do with the town. They had planned the canals and mill locations. They knew from the start that they’d need consistent water.

Now, to get a steady flow, you need a place to store a lot of water. Normally, that would be the mill pond that builds up behind a dam. If you have a big mill, and the mills in Lowell were bigger than anyone had built before, then you need a very big reservoir. The investors in the Lowell factories looked around and said to themselves, Lake Winnipesaukee ought to be big enough.

SFX water

CUT STU we’re standing just below the falls in Lakeport.

Historian Stu Wallace met us at one of several dams that lie between Lake Winnipesaukee and the Merrimack. This particular dam is unusual. It was the site of a symbolic but ineffective protest.

The site of the 1859 attack on the dam in Lakeport. (Jon Greenberg, NHPR)

CUT STU In 1859 there was a riot here; about 50 guys decided that the dam has to go. They used whatever they could get their hands on. Hammers, axes.

Why attack a dam? Because it flooded farmers’ fields and could ruin a hay crop. This was an old problem.

CUT STU We’d been building dams for local mills for 200 years before these dams.

This dam served a distant mill. The cloth made in Lowell might be sold in Ohio. The owners had their offices in Boston and Lowell. And they didn’t own just this dam. Quietly, they had bought dams on almost every lake that feeds the Merrimack.

CUT STU What you have now is massive water control all over the watershed for out of state mills.

When the mills in Lowell needed more power than the Merrimack could offer on its own, they sent word up to the Lakes Region. The sluice gates would open and about 70 miles later, those extra cubic feet of water would send the turbines in Lowell spinning at full tilt.

This system of control generated more than power; there were plenty of law suits. The owners of the Lowell mills went to court at least 13 times over their dams and their use of the river water. In the end, the courts decided that some users of the river, the mill owners, were more important than others. This was a radical shift.

To help us see how radical, we turn to John Cumbler, an environmental historian at the University of Louisville.

Cumbler says that before the big mills

CUT Downstream owners had a right to the water in its natural state

Natural as in free flowing and good to use for drinking, or power or whatever. No one had any special claim on the river. The water had to be shared to serve the general community interest.

But along came the owners of the mills in Lowell, and Lawrence, not to mention Manchester and Nashua.

CUT They invested huge amounts and they didn’t have the luxury to let those mills sit idle ever.

They couldn’t afford to share, at least not by the old rules. They told the courts, and the judges agreed,

CUT The interest in the region was not the interest of the small farmers but for the corporations to be successful financial ventures.

And to be successful, they needed water power all the time. The judges said it was a reasonable use of the river, even if it hurt someone else.

Cumbler says judges applied that principle of reasonable use to what came to be an even bigger problem than flooding – pollution. With factories and cities dumping waste in the Merrimack, law suits poured into the courts.

CUT Downstream owners saying we can’t drink the water, it’s poisoning our livestock. It’s foul, it’s nasty, it smells bad. And the corporations saying, we’re using it in a reasonable way, we’re using it in a reasonable way. And initially, the courts go back and forth. Some cases went for the citizens, some cases went for the corporations. But increasingly, they went for the corporations. And the cities. The corporations weren’t alone in this.

At the start of the 1800’s, the river was seen as a common resource. By the middle of the century, the factory owners enjoyed a special claim on its waters – for power and to carry away their waste. The mental shift was so complete, that it would be a hundred years before an equally profound shift, the environmental movement, would begin to rein in the right to pollute in the name of prosperity.

For NHPR News, I’m Jon Greenberg.