THE HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING RIVER SCIENCE: THE FLOWAGE CONTROVERSY IN THE CONCORD RIVER VALLEY, MASSACHUSETTS (1635-1862)

America’s first, large-scale environmental impact assessment occurred in the north-flowing Concord River Valley of Massachusetts between December 1858 and April 1862. The social, economic, medical, aesthetic, ecological, and legal aspects of this so-called “flowage controversy” were examined during what was effectively a state class-action lawsuit involving two governors, both houses of the legislature, eight appointed committees, nine towns, and the Supreme Judicial Court. The salient legal question was whether a low dam originally built in 1710 was chiefly responsible for back-flooding or “flowing” the thousands of acres of natural meadows that had nucleated colonial settlement in 1635, and which still undergirded the 19^th century agricultural economy.

Owing to political corruption and ignorance of the geological complexities, the dam was ultimately left in place, the meadows degraded into marsh and swamp, the the wetlands were claimed as U.S. National Wildlife Refuges, and the rivers designated "Wild and Scenic." This precedent-setting case study features the anonymous, and previously unknown scientific work of Henry David Thoreau, whose pioneering river science predated that of John Wesley Powell, G.K. Gilbert, and William Morris Davis by decades. His eighteen months of field and theoretical work on catchment hydrology, channel hydraulics, sediment transport, and fluvial geomorphology reveal that the environmental mistakes made by landowners, attorneys and engineers resulted from ignoring the geoscience of disrupted Anthropocene rivers.