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The Cost of Commerce
The exploitation of the Great Bay's natural resources over three centuries was not without its cost. As early as 1750, as Saltonstall writes, James Birket, a sea captain from Antigua, observed that the salmon had forsaken the Piscataqua because of "the sawdust from the mills." (Man-made dams, which cut the salmon off from their spawning grounds, didn't help either.) By the 1790s there was so much activity on the Piscataqua that New Hampshire passed a law prohibiting the throwing of "ballast, rubbish, gravel, earth, stone, dirt, ashes and filth into said river." By the 19th century, the only trace of the once ample forest was layers of sawdust deposits throughout the waters of the Great Bay region. Even the mudflats of blue clay were largely exhausted by the more than 40 brickyards in the Piscataqua basin, many of whose bricks adorned the finest houses on Boston's Beacon Hill.
As the 19th century wore on, tidal towns such as Exeter turned from the sea to manufacturing. New Hampshire's first paper mill was established at Exeter in 1777, and an early trustee of the Academy, Deacon Thomas Odiorne, founded the first sailcloth factory in New Hampshire at Exeter in 1790. By the 1830s, the Exeter Manufacturing Company, the town's first significant manufacturing enterprise, was producing cotton sheeting.
Long the region's busy front yard where ships were launched for voyages throughout the world, the Great Bay estuary had, by the 20th century, become instead the soiled back yard as Piscataqua towns turned inward and away from the water, using it as a dumping ground for sewage and industrial waste. During World War II, when the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard employed 20,000 workers in submarine construction, launching 79 submarines (including four in one day in January, 1944), all manner of waste was discharged into the Piscataqua River, a practice that ended only in 1976. As recently as the early 1990s, there were still numerous hazardous-material sites in need of cleanup, both at the shipyard and nearby Pease Air Force Base bordering Great Bay. The legacy of over three centuries of toxic contamination remains stored in the sediments of Great Bay.
A Turning Point
The wakeup call for New Hampshire came in the fall of 1973 when it became public that Aristotle Onassis' Olympic Refineries had quietly obtained options on 3,000 acres of land on Durham Point in Little Bay (which adjoins Great Bay) to build the world's largest oil refinery. It would take extraordinary leadership by the citizens of Durham (and the passage of home-rule legislation in New Hampshire giving Durham residents a vote in the matter) before the project was defeated in 1974.
But in retrospect, this was the turning point. The New Hampshire conservation community had been aroused and it set in motion efforts that would lead, in 1989, to Great Bay being designated a national estuarine reserve, part of a nationwide system supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Managed by the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve totals 4,500 acres of tidal waters and wetlands and 800 acres of shoreline. Two years later, the Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge was created when 1,100 acres of shorefront extending along much of the eastern shore of Great Bay-shorefront that had formerly been part of Pease Air Force Base-was transferred by the Department of Defense to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In 1994, an extraordinary partnership was formed: nine organizations and agencies-the Audubon Society of New Hampshire, Ducks Unlimited, Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the New Hampshire chapter of The Nature Conservancy-joined together to form the Great Bay Resource Protection Partnership. This partnership was created in response to the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, a joint agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico to protect waterfowl habitats. Great Bay was designated an important "focus area," whose abundant wetlands make the bay a crucial wintering and migration habitat for waterfowl, particularly the black duck.
Our River Runs to It
The Squamscott River links Phillips Exeter to the Great Bay—and beyond.
Phillips Exeter Academy owes its founding, at least indirectly, to its proximity to the Great Bay. John Phillips, the Academy's founder, began his business career selling general merchandise and soon expanded into the export/import business. As Myron R. Williams explains in his 1957 book, The Story of Phillips Exeter, prior to the start of the Revolutionary War, Phillips enjoyed "a prosperous trade with England, shipping many a white pine mast and spar for the Royal Navy" by way of the Great Bay. It was the fortune he amassed in shipping (and later in real estate and banking) that enabled Phillips, together with his second wife, Elizabeth, to sign the Deed of Gift that led to the Academy's founding in 1781.
"Not everyone realizes the Squamscott is a tidal river," says PEA Spanish instructor Mark Trafton, "but that's what gives Exeter its history as a port town." Trafton, who grew up not far from the Great Bay in Madbury, NH, and who today advises the Academy's Environmental Action Committee, says being a port "was a real lifeline back then, like being an exit on the interstate is today. Gundalows [simple, flat-bottomed boats developed to carry heavy loads in shallow waters] carried goods that couldn't be brought in over land."
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| The Squamscott River has long been home to the Academy crew teams, including this varsity boat from 1915 (top photo) and the girls' 2001 varsity eight. |
Today, the Academy continues to benefit from its location. "Because of the tides," says science department chair Chris Matlack, "Exeter is connected, in a very visible way, to the Great Bay twice each day." No one knows this better than the Academy's crew teams, who coordinate their fall and spring practice sessions on the Squamscott with the tide charts. "Life would be simpler if we rowed on a lake," laughs David Swift '64, who, with Lawrence Smith, coaches the boy's varsity team. On the other hand, he adds, the constant churning of the tides means the ice goes out early on the Squamscott-last winter on March 26, a good two weeks earlier than the lake on which St. Paul's School rows. Nor does the Squamscott get a lot of other boat traffic, which leaves the rowers free to concentrate on navigating the river's winding course. The varsity eights, girls as well as boys, regularly row out to the Newfields Bridge and back-8.5 miles roundtrip, a distance they cover in an hour. Every fall, on a Wednesday afternoon when the tides are right, all 12 crews row the length of the Squamscott, past the Newfields and the Boston & Maine Railroad bridges and into the Great Bay itself. "The boats line up 12 across and do some short races," says Swift. "It's quite a sight."
Swift knows the sights along the Squamscott were considerably different back in the 1920s and 1930s, when his father, Charles Swift '31, was a student here (he later returned to teach and coach crew). "Back then, coal was brought up the river by barge, and my father remembered huge, 40-foot-tall piles of coal along the waterfront," he says. This was also the era when the town dump was located just a few hundred yards downstream (the current, and very scenic, site of Swazey Parkway). Says Swift, with some understatement: "It probably wasn't a very clean river to row on back then."
Water quality has definitely improved, something Chris Matlack and his ecology students observed firsthand during the 1990s when they took part in the Great Bay Coast Watch-a volunteer project coordinated by the UNH Extension to compile water-quality data at two dozen different sites in the estuary. Twice a month, they collected water samples at the Exeter town dock and tested them for pH level, dissolved oxygen and fecal bacteria content, as well as clarity and salinity. The project provided "a snapshot of the bay" at high and low tides, says Matlack, and students enjoyed the work because it wasn't just another abstract lab-their efforts had real applications.
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| The Great Bay estuary becomes a classroom in the spring for marine biology students. Here, science instructor Dr. Sydnee Goddard (left) shows Daniel Graves, Sarah Foster, Leandro Marini and Kerri Sanders some of the finer points of horseshoe crab anatomy. |
When instructor Karen Geary took her AP physics students out on the Squamscott last spring, it wasn't so much for the marine life (although they did rescue an injured teal duck en route) as for the manmade structures that span the river. "We were doing an end-of-term project on bridging," says Geary, an Army engineer captain before she joined the Academy, "so we went out on the river to look at the various bridges and to see how they were built." They studied the stringers and the lateral bracing under the Highway 101 bridge; checked out the Route 108 "singing bridge," one of the oldest turning bridges in the country; and watched concrete being poured for the new bridge that will replace it. "The kids loved it," says Geary.
For Mark Trafton, the Great Bay is a great place to go simply to get some peace and quiet, whether in his boat or on the clam flats up on the Newmarket-Durham town line. "One of my very favorite views is the one I get when I'm bent over digging clams and looking back at the Squamscott trestle bridge," he jokes. Foraging for clams along the bay is not for the faint of heart or weak of back-Trafton likens it to farming in New England, because of all the digging among the rocks. But the clams are fresh and the sense of place powerful. "It really reminds me of the bay's history," he says. "You're in the same place [doing something that has been done for centuries]. The only difference is time."
—The Editors
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