Those supporting removal of Camden's much-loved Olmsted-designed dam and waterfall maintain that alewives routinely made it up the Megunticook River to spawn in the centuries before Anglo settlers came to the region.

The long explanation accompanying Warrant Article 7 on the ballot tells us of the many Megunticook River Citizens Advisory Committee (MRCAC) meetings held over two years, the newsletters, the online survey responses, and all the interactions with standing Camden committees—including the Camden Library Board of Trustees.

A wealth of detail unfolds: "10 expert-led online presentations, engineering reports, and 2019 and 2021 River Feasibility Reports" (from InterFluve)—all intended to persuade voters that no stone was left unturned in examining every aspect of the river and its dams.

If you were to add in MRCAC's own 35-page final report, it appears the committee has provided Camden's townspeople with close to 400 pages of text, graphs, photos, and appendices dealing with the river—all this without ever producing any indisputable evidence that alewives made it up the Megunticook to spawn, either in this or any other age.

So, here's why it's extremely unlikely alewives ever made the trip up our river—beavers and their dams.

The issues surrounding beaver dams appear never to have been taken seriously—or even brought up for discussion—by any of those experts, fishermen, anglers, engineers, NOAA reps, or MRCAC committee members in all those presentations and public meetings. In effect, MRCAC failed to touch all the bases in its busy, much publicized two-year effort that finally produced what a great many citizens anticipated it would produce—a recommendation to destroy Montgomery Dam as a first step in "freeing" the river... from what?

Thirty-seven years ago, Dr. R. J. Naiman, a leading young researcher in the structure and dynamics of riverine ecosystems (and Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington in Seattle) published an article in Bioscience, a professional journal, entitled, "Alteration of North American Streams by Beavers", which ultimately led to a fresh appreciation, nationwide, of North America's largest rodents and their amazing abilities and accomplishments, particularly in creating wetlands.

For our purposes here, though, the article made it clear that beavers (lots of them, three to fi e million in the Maine district alone in the 17th Century) built—and continue today to build—dams that just happen to block alewife passage very effectively. As everybody in Camden must know by now, alewives can't jump, nor are they capable of wiggling through narrow openings or squeezing under obstacles. Thus, as Naiman et al observed, [historically] "the small streams through which alewives migrate to spawn were probably regularly blocked by beaver dams and wind throws", and, "an active beaver dam... could have easily blocked migration into and out of coastal watersheds."

Bringing this closer to home: back in 2004, College of the Atlantic students conducted an extensive survey of the Union River in Ellsworth and its watershed as a component of an alewife restoration project. At the time, Mainers who lived near a number of ponds and streams feeding into the river repeatedly told the students that beaver dams kept alewives from going upstream to spawn. (Material about this study is available on the internet, for those interested.)

Similarly, for some years now, an alewife restoration project has been ongoing, opening up alewife passage from the Bagaduce River, near Castine, to/from Walker Pond. Making this happen in 2022 required clearing away beaver dams, entailing a lot of hard physical work—the dams being so well-constructed—and destroying the animals' "lodges"(with their clever underwater entrances), as well as capturing and "relocating" the beavers and their offspringto some distant site. (Isn't it funny how a human being, trying to keep from stepping on a praying mantis in the garden, trods on a toad instead?)

Recently, in 2024, it seems beavers reappeared in the Bagaduce project! These industrious creatures began building again, and had to be removed—again. 

What do you imagine the "Megunticook River" must've looked like back in the late 1760s, when it was finally safe for settlers to come to the Camden area, following the end of the Indian wars.  (What was left of the Wabanaki had been driven west and north, practically to the border with Canada.)

The "river" would have been much like a brook, flash-flooding each spring, snowmelt coming from the watershed's overflowing shallow ponds. By August, it would've resumed being a brook—not that big—running down mostly through ancient forest, with lots of blow-downs and debris cluttering its progress. Beavers would've loved it! Lots to eat! Lots to build with! No people! No traps! No guns! 

Of course the settlers made short shrift of the ancient forest, and probably ate the beavers the first hard winter. By 1794, the settlers had built two dams, creating the lake as a reservoir, turning the brook into a steady, controlled stream to power sawmills. It may be that Atlantic salmon could've jumped their way up that narrow original brook to spawn before the 1760s, but the alewives couldn't have made the trip beyond the first beaver dam. 

It has come as a surprise to many that the Camden Library Board of Trustees has bought into the alewife story and the potential for "flooding" as excuses for destroying the Montgomery Dam and ultimately stripping away the bottom fifth of Harbor Park.

If you look at the Camden Library's Annual Report for 2024, you'll see that the annual "allowance" from the town ($555,000) added to the annual endowment ($127,437) do not even meet the professional and support staff yearly expenses. The hundreds of donors listed pick up most of the costs of the Library's operations from year to year. Are they backing this endorsement of the destruction of Montgomery Dam and the seawall, as well?

On page 8 of the Camden Herald, Thursday, August 26, 2021, the excellent investigative journalist and Assistant Editor of the paper, Susan Mustapich, reported a statement from Marti Wolfe, then a Camden Library Trustee: "It's my job to preserve Harbor Park." And further, she said: "We need to preserve the Olmsted design and what Mary Louise Curtis Bok has done. It's very difficult for me to endorse a concept that has river running through Harbor Park." 

Now, there was a trustee with a backbone! We could use a good many more like her. Surely hearing this would've given Mary Louise Curtis Bok—who for good reason kept control of the library out of the hands of the Camden Select Board— cause to smile up in heaven. 

John Webster lives in Camden