Connecticut River Museum

THE "GREAT RIVER" OF NEW ENGLAND
THE CONNECTICUT RIVER

Excerpted from Edmund Delaney's The Connecticut River: New England's Historic Waterway. (Copyright, All Rights Reserved)

Vermont - New Hampshire

The sources of the river are in New Hampshire, a few hundred yards from the Canadian border. Little streams emanate from the mountain peaks, cross swamps and bogs, and then flow into four lakes, each named Connecticut, but distinguished by numbers. The fourth and northernmost lake, considered to be the real source of the river, is one mile long; the second is slightly larger with two point seventy-five miles, and the first lake covers four miles. Each lake has been artificially extended by dams built in the 1930s. From the first lake, the river flows into Lake Francis, a manmade lake created in 1940 when New Hampshire built a one hundred-foot dam at its western end.

Fourth, and northernmost Connecticut Lake

The river is the boundary between New Hampshire and Vermont. The northernmost town on the river is Pittsburg, New Hampshire, which covers almost 300 square miles. It is situated on the western end of Lake Francis, near the convergence of Indian Stream and the Connecticut. Only in recent years opened up to the automobile traveler, this is a region of wilderness, a land for the fisherman, the hunter, the canoeist, and the nature lover. In the winter, covered as it is with snow, it has become a vast track for the snowmobile. This is also the area which declared itself the Independent Republic of Indian Stream in 1832, complete with its own president and constitution, but it was taken over by New Hampshire ten years later.

The river, marked by many rapids and gorges, and augmented by feeder streams, reaches the Vermont border at Beecher Falls. Passing Colebrook and Stratford on the New Hampshire side and Lemington and Bloomfield on the Vermont side, it enters the Coos country, an old Indian name meaning "the place of the curved river," although, in fact, the Connecticut curves throughout its entire course.

The Coos region is a rich valley covering some one hundred miles, with fertile meadows and gentle rolling hills edged by the White Mountains on the east and the Green Mountains to the west. Not without reason, this region is sometimes called the "Garden of New England."

At Northumberland, the river twists, turns, and meanders through the valley, forming a beautiful oxbow. From Lancaster, a bucolic town in rich farmland, there is a magnificent view of the surrounding Presidential Range of the White Mountains, including Mount Washington, 6,288 feet high.

Picking up more feeder streams on each side, the river is enlarged and enriched, spilling over a series of dams, some of which produce most of the electrical energy in New England: Guildhall-Northumberland, Gilman, Moore, Comerford, McIndoes Falls, and Ryegate.

McIndoes Falls Dam

Caledonia County on the Vermont side of the river is one of the three northeastern Vermont counties sometimes called the Northeast Kingdom. One town, Garnet, was originally settled by immigrants from Scotland, who gave the county its name. It was once hoped that steamboats could travel all the way upriver to Barnet, and there was a much heralded attempt in 1826 by a steamboat optimistically named the Barnet, but there were too many river obstructions. Barnet has been content to rest with the produce of its rich dairy farms.

Taking in the Wells River and Ammonoosuc River at Woodsville, the river flows through the valley of rural Vermont and New Hampshire. This is a valley of pastoral hillsides with cows, sheep, and red barns, and quiet villages with country stores, white steepled churches and meeting houses, white frame houses, and village greens with Civil War monuments and bandstands. It is an area renowned for its seasonal contrasts: the green foliage covering the hills in the summer; the autumnal reds, oranges, and yellows; the winter snow portrayed on so many Christmas cards; and the ever-renewing spring with its blossoms and wild flowers covering the countryside.

From Wells River to White River Junction, some forty miles south, is the so-called Lower Coos Country. This is a rich countryside with well tended farms and fertile fields. The towns along the riverbanks are particularly attractive: Newbury, Bradford, Fairlee, the Thetfords, and Norwich in Vermont, and Haverhill, Orford, Lyme, and Hanover in New Hampshire. At Newbury, the river makes a four-mile loop at the "Great Oxbow" before it returns to a spot less than one-half mile from its original course. North of White River Junction is the Wilder Dam, which creates a reservoir extending thirty-five miles back to Newbury. Norwich and Hanover mark the river crossing for the Appalachian Trail.

As the river flows southward, picking up more volume from its tributaries, there are large towns every fifteen or twenty miles along the river: Windsor, Claremont, Springfield, Bellows Falls, and Brattleboro, all small enclaves of light industry. Along the way the river joins with the White River and the Ottauqueches River with its splendid Quechee Gorge. It flows past Windsor, in the shadow of Mount Ascutney, the highest peak in the Connecticut River Valley at 3,144 feet. The river almost touches Springfield, where it meets with the Black River flowing down from the Green Mountains. Pouring over the dam at Bellows Falls, it passes the Indian Petroglyphs, Indian carvings by members of the Pennacook tribe, made on the rocks along the riverbanks below the falls. The river continues past several picturesque towns in rolling hills and rich dairy country: Putney and Westminster in Vermont, and Chesterfield, Westmoreland, and Walpole in New Hampshire. Of Putney, Senator George D. Aiken, who lived there for many years, said: "I call it the intellectual center of the world. It's where people from Harvard come to get the rust rubbed off."

The river joins with the West River at Brattleboro and then with the Ashuelot at Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Across from Hinsdale is Vernon, the first town in a flat, rich alluvial flood plain that extends through Massachusetts and all the way down to Middletown, Connecticut. In Vernon, there are large farms as well as the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant.

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