Housatonic River

About

Housatonic River, Connecticut — 1691 Derby Company, Eric Sloane. The Housatonic gathers at the confluence of its East and West branches in the Berkshire Hills, then runs 149 miles through Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a small part of New York before emptying into Long Island Sound at Milford. Along that course it drains 1,950 square miles. Long before European settlement, the valley was Schaghticoke and Mohican territory. The Schaghticoke Tribal Nation still maintains a reservation at the confluence of the Housatonic and the Ten Mile River in Kent — one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in Connecticut, and a reminder that the river's human story predates its colonial ledger by centuries.

Colonial commerce arrived in 1691, when Captain John and Edward Wooster established the Derby Company and made the Housatonic the first commercially navigable river in Connecticut. For the next century and a quarter the current did the work of an engine. From 1735 to 1810 the river powered more than thirty iron and paper mills strung along its banks. The Salisbury iron-mining boom of 1795–1800 became the first iron-mining industry in the United States; cannon for the Continental Navy, including those bound for the Constitution, were cast in Salisbury. These were not backwater operations — the valley's forges tied a rural river to the machinery of a young nation.

Timber followed iron. The watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations. By 1910 the old-growth stands were exhausted; state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s finally ended large-scale cutting. The river reinvented itself as a major paper-mill center between 1880 and 1920, and from 1889 to 1910 Polish and Italian immigrants settled the valley in large numbers, giving the mill towns a new working population.

Industry left a heavy legacy. From the 1970s through the 1990s, General Electric's Pittsfield, Massachusetts plant discharged PCBs into the water, making the Housatonic one of the most PCB-contaminated rivers in the United States. The EPA's 1999 Rest of River cleanup plan, expanded in 2016, ranks among the largest Superfund projects in New England, and the EPA-ordered restoration continues today. The river's scientific record runs deeper still: USGS surveys began in the 1870s, followed by gauging stations, state streamflow assessments, and Clean Water Act evaluations from 1972 to 2000.

Today the Housatonic is measured at USGS gauge 01199000, where flows average about 2,200 cubic feet per second and paddlers find optimal conditions between 400 and 2,000 CFS. The whitewater runs Class I–III: Bull's Bridge Gorge is the signature Class III drop, while the Kent-to-Cornwall Bridge stretch offers gentler Class I–II water through covered-bridge country. Between the Class III gorge and the Class I–II reaches, the river spans a wide range of paddling difficulty. Clarke Outdoors has guided canoe and kayak trips from West Cornwall since 1978. The valley also holds the Eric Sloane Museum, founded in Kent in 1969, and the river is recognized as a Connecticut Scenic River, threading a corridor shared with the Appalachian Trail and the Bull's Bridge Recreation Area.