Restoring Flows and Habitats By Jim Glinski, Scituate Another major goal of the NSRWA’s strategic plan announced in 2005 “is to restore water quality, water quantity, and critical habitats through efforts to restore and maintain streamflows to promote the recharging/recycling of water, to ensure that every watershed town has a stormwater plan, and to prevent […]
Into the 21st Century The following is the 7th installment of a twelve-part series on the history of the organization. By Jim Glinski, Scituate As the NSRWA moves through the early decades of the 21st century and celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2020, it is a different organization than the one founded in 1970. From […]
Effective Campaigns and Growing Partnerships By Jim Glinski, Scituate In November 1998, Steve Ivas was succeeded as executive director of the NSRWA by Bill Stanton, who was the first executive director who did not have a science-based professional background. Bill was a lawyer-environmentalist, who was chairman of the Marshfield Conservation Commission and recently spent 4 […]
Raising the Bar The following is the fifth installment of a twelve-part series on the history of the organization. You can read the other installments here. By Jim Glinski, Scituate The NSRWA continued to evolve and grow as an organization. As Executive Director Samantha Woods stated at the time of the NSRWA’s 40th anniversary in […]
Early Activism Leads to Cleaner Rivers By Jim Glinski, Scituate The Scituate Wastewater Treatment Plant was built in the 1960s to treat town sewage and to discharge wastewater into the ground only. Over time the sand filtration system became inadequate to treat the growing volume of sewage. During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, […]
The following story was unearthed recently. It tells the tale of the Brig Polly, a 131 ton ship constructed in Pembroke in 1791. She was probably built by shipbuilders Alden Briggs, Calvin Turner and Icabod Thomas, Jr. Her home port was Boston. Lost Ships and Lonely Seas by Ralph D. Paine 1920 A hundred years […]
A Second Wind: “Watershed Wakes Up — How About You” (Newsletter, May 1989) By Jim Glinski, Scituate In a frank letter to its members in May 1989, the NSRWA admitted that after the passage of the North River Scenic Protective Order in 1978, “we all relaxed because it seemed like the state would take care […]
By Caleb Estabrooks, Hanover Fox Hill is located in present day Norwell where the Barque Hill/Brigantine Circle neighborhood can be found. Today it is difficult to identify the hills that dominated the landscape, but during the colonial and early federalist era; when the area was deforested and before the bulldozers had leveled the land for […]
The First Decade By Jim Glinski, Scituate Even though the NSRWA lacked a permanent office and held meetings in private homes, under the leadership of its first president, Bill Finn, it got right to work to preserve the scenic and recreational values of the North and South Rivers. In January it published its first newsletter, […]
By Caleb Estabrooks, Hanover The year 1821 was not a particularly busy year for North River Shipyards: The Panic of 1819 had set in and few people were investing in shipping. As a result only eight ships were launched on the North River that year. Despite this, John B. and Elijah Barstow managed to build […]