Sixty years ago, Hollywood great Katharine Hepburn called the Connecticut River “the world’s most beautifully landscaped cesspool.” She had an estate at the river’s mouth in Old Saybrook, Conn., and in 1965 narrated a documentary film that told of centuries of pollution of the stream and advocated for action to clean it up.

What followed was an environmental movement in all four of the Connecticut River watershed’s states boosted by new federal and state laws. These would push it from a horror of filth to a river that today over much of its reaches is boatable, fishable and swimmable. The river stem and its many tributaries in the Upper Valley region now reflect their dramatic transformation to important scenic and recreational resources.

In a word, the substantial cleansing of the Connecticut represents by far the greatest environmental achievement in the Upper Valley, ever.

In the summer of 2024, Annette Spaulding, a lifelong scuba diver and aquatic archaeologist, explored a deep pool at the foot of Sumner Falls in Plainfield. Equipped with Go-Pro video recording gear, she descended to a depth of 34 feet searching for artifacts from the location’s log drive and sawmilling days. The water was clear enough that sunlight penetrated all the way down to the river bottom, and her camera picked up sharp images of ledges and stones strewn about, plus shots of curious bass and trout checking her out.

That level of clarity would never have been found in the bad old days. Actually, it surely would have been mighty difficult to find someone willing to consider diving into that water at all back then.

It’s nearly impossible to adequately describe the sorry condition of the river in the 1960s. Raw sewage coursed through pipes straight into the river from Hanover, White River Junction, Lebanon, Windsor and Claremont’s municipal collection systems. Smaller communities similarly relied on the action of the river and tributary streams to carry away their human waste.

Many individual homeowners’ disposal systems consisted simply of a sewer pipe straight to the adjacent streambank. Others had installed septic tanks, but the effluent often went directly to the nearby brook. If not to the adjacent waterway, the outflow from the tanks frequently would just run downgrade to a field, pasture or woodland, where rains could eventually wash away what hadn’t soaked into the earth.

It wasn’t just domestic waste that was being dumped into the Connecticut, though. There were commercial and industrial polluters scattered all over the watershed. The E. Cummings leather tannery in Lebanon regularly purged its vats by dumping the chemicals into the Mascoma. The liquids gave off a distinctive sulfurous smell, like rotten eggs, headed down to the Connecticut and often could be scented eight miles downriver in Plainfield and Hartland. Textile mills in Claremont regularly dumped dyes into the Sugar River, casting red, yellow, green, purple and other hues into the stream as it flowed toward the main river.

For a while around Claremont, there was a mordant take on a 1920s jazz classic covered by Ella Fitzgerald and many others: Not “When my sugar walks down the street, all the little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet” but “When my Sugar goes down the creek, all the fishes go eek, eek, eek.”

Clumps of feathers from a South Royalton poultry processing plant were a frequent sight on the White River. Dumps, some private and some town-owned, were a common feature on the banks of the Connecticut over the first half of the 20th century. High water in the spring would carry off the trash at the bottom of the disposal heaps. Sawdust from lumber mills frequently was just blown into streams. Stacks of winter manure stored on low-lying meadows might be washed away in spring floods.

Kids growing up along the Connecticut in the mid-20th century were often forbidden to venture near the river. Old-timers today can recall, if they ever visited the river’s edge, being repelled by the sight of human excrement, toilet paper and other gross stuff floating along the water’s surface — usually plenty enough to dissuade them from wading in.

Change would come, inspired by the messaging of environmental activists and the advocacy of people like Hepburn and her documentary. In the late-1960s state legislatures began passing laws aimed at restricting industrial pollution and addressing the need for local governments to confront their waste management problems.

But it would be federal pressure and money that really got the ball rolling on cleaning up the Connecticut. The Clean Water Act (CWA) and related legislation enacted during the Nixon Administration are easily the most significant events in what became a half century of steady progress toward ridding the watershed of its awful image and reputation.

Foremost in the first years of the 1972 CWA was a huge public works financing program to build wastewater treatment plants to address municipal sewage discharges. The federal government put up 75% of the cost of construction of the facilities, with the states and localities left to cover the other 25%. Communities had little choice but to move as both state and federal laws were compelling action.

For a decade, engineering companies were busy turning out designs and blueprints, steel and concrete were being installed, lines were being laid to connect up sewer networks and personnel were being trained in the science of modern wastewater treatment. All the Upper Valley’s larger communities became involved, sometimes screaming and kicking over the cost for both their share of the upfront money and the expense of operation down the road.

But there was no turning back, and one by one Upper Valley communities were putting treatment plants into service. In 1987, the 75-25 gravy train ended, and thereafter federal support for capital projects dropped to 55% and then it became a revolving loan program. A few very small communities still lagged, and U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development initiatives came in with grant and loan funds to help build small-scale plants or to link small villages with larger neighbors via overland connections.

While cities and towns were busy building wastewater treatment plants, federal and state authorities were invoking laws to compel industrial polluters to address their issues. Some adopted new, clean technologies or changed their processes; others just ceased operations and went out of business. The reach of the CWA was extending into “nonpoint” sources of pollution such as agriculture, forestry, mining and other dispersed activities from which water can accumulate and transport pollutants. This aspect has bred much contention, with litigation and legislative tinkering the norm for the past four decades.

While all of this was going on, an equally important initiative was playing out at the state and local level. The watershed’s tens of thousands of private septic systems were coming under design and construction regulations. New systems had to meet state-set performance standards and existing septic installations — in a process that’s still ongoing — have been getting upgrades to meet state specifications. And agriculture and forestry changed, too, with growing emphasis on preventing erosion and soil loss to reduce sediment in the waters.

But no doubt about it, the Connecticut River watershed is a vastly different place due to the work and money expended over the past half century.

Challenges remain, however, as Rebecca Todd, head of the Connecticut River Conservancy, is quick to point out. The conservancy has been deeply involved in watershed issues since the 1950s and continues its advocacy and educational work on behalf of the watershed today.

At the top of Todd’s list is climate change. Drought and then excessive precipitation events leading to flooding are becoming more frequent, with major impacts on the watershed’s land and streams. Dry conditions disrupt vegetation that protects the soil. Stormwater runoff from farmland, parking lots and other vulnerable locations carries pollutants, sediment and bacterial contamination.

Combined sewer overflows are a problem in many locations. Stormwater drains are often connected to sewer lines, and the surge of water from heavy rains can overwhelm the capacity of a treatment plant to do its job. Lebanon has spent millions and disrupted neighborhoods for years separating stormwater mains from sewers, but the problem continues for many communities. Hartford, Conn., in early April saw its wastewater system overwhelmed by heavy rainfall, necessitating the discharge of hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage directly into the river.

Sediment in the river can contain what’s called legacy contamination from past industrial and agricultural activities. There’s concern about PFAs, microplastics and various materials coming from factories, dumps and other sources.

Invasive species are a steadily expanding concern. From water chestnut to milfoil to knotweed, at least 20 plant species are menacing waterways, and undesirable marine life is constantly lurking, as well.

The conservancy is currently involved in the complicated process for relicensing the watershed’s 12 hydro-electric dams by the federal government and keeps track of the almost 3,000 dams still holding back water on tributaries

But for Todd, the challenges don’t diminish the real success story of bringing the Connecticut to where it is today.

“As a kid growing up in Walpole, N.H., I was admonished not to swim in the river. Fast forward to last fall, when conservancy board member Kari Kastango became the first known person to swim all 410 miles of the river. The dramatic improvements undertaken during my lifetime mean that our river is now fishable and swimmable,” Todd said.

Annette Spaulding, the Bellows Falls, Vt.-based scuba-diving explorer of the river bottom, also loves to kayak new places. Last summer she discovered the stretch of the river between Sumner Falls and the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge. She found it to be almost like primeval times — dense forest on both sides down to water’s edge for miles, crystal clear water slowly meandering over gravel bars, no motorboats, bald eagles soaring overhead, Mount Ascutney looming beyond.

“(We) never could have enjoyed this 60 years ago,” she said.

Steve Taylor is an occasional contributor to the Valley News. He lives in Meriden.