West River

About

West River, Vermont — Townshend Dam 1961, West River Railroad, Brattleboro. Long before dams and railroads, the West River watershed was Western Abenaki territory, and the river itself served as a travel route from the Green Mountains down to the Connecticut River valley. That role as a corridor never really changed; only the traffic did. From the 1830s through the 1920s the watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion of the later nineteenth century, worked by local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations. The exhaustion of the old-growth stands around 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s together brought the large-scale cutting to an end.

The river also powered the early Vermont economy directly. Water-powered grist and saw mills operated at every town along its course, tying the settlements of Mount Holly, Weston, Londonderry, Jamaica, Townshend, Newfane, and Dummerston to the current running past them. Two projects came to anchor the river's modern infrastructure. The first was the West River Railroad, a Brattleboro-to-Londonderry short line built between 1899 and 1901 that operated until 1936; it is documented in Vermont PBS's 'This Place in History' segment on the line. The second was the Townshend Dam, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers between 1959 and 1961 for flood control in the West and Connecticut River valleys.

The science had arrived earlier. The first comprehensive hydrological studies of the West River came with the USGS survey work of the 1870s through the 1890s, the establishment of gauging stations from the 1880s into the 1910s, and state geological survey streamflow assessments in the 1910s through 1930s. Later state water pollution control studies from the 1950s through the 1970s, and Clean Water Act assessments after 1972, addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts, with restoration and TMDL programs the current outcome.

Today the river is defined by its two contrasting reaches. Above, the Ball Mountain Dam to Jamaica section is the release run, Class III–IV, timed to the Army Corps' scheduled openings; the reach falls within the Ball Mountain Dam Recreation Area. Below Jamaica, the river eases to Class I–II on the lower run to Brattleboro. Townshend Lake, a 95-acre reservoir at the Townshend Dam site, is the principal recreational reach, with a town beach and a state park; the dam's original Cold Spring Brook primitive campground dates to 1968.

The railroad's old bed found a second life as the West River Trail, a 36-mile pedestrian and bicycle path developed and maintained by the West River Trail nonprofit organization. The corridor that once carried logs and short-line cars now carries hikers and cyclists, while the water below still draws paddlers to the fall release weekends. The river is a candidate for Vermont Scenic River designation, a formal recognition of what the West River Race crowd has understood since 1979: this is a working flood-control river that, on the right weekend, becomes one of New England's whitewater institutions.