The rescue mission, as Trout Unlimited tells it, was launched with a single word: "Trout!" Construction crews had just knocked down a small dam on a stream cutting through downtown Freeport, and as the impoundment behind it drained into the breach, volunteers waited at a net stretched across the opening, hoping to catch fish that might otherwise have been stranded in the silt. Sam Lambert, a Trout Unlimited volunteer, reached into the muck with a hand net and came up with a silvery nine-inch brook trout. Someone shouted for a bucket of clean water.
That scene is the backstory to Salter Saturday, a free, open-to-the-public celebration of Maine's native sea-run brook trout set for Saturday, Oct. 17, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Freeport Community Center, 63 Depot St. The event is sponsored by the Merrymeeting Bay chapter of Trout Unlimited and doubles as a stop on a fall book tour for "Salter," the first comprehensive book ever written about sea-run brook trout.
The day begins earlier, at 10 a.m., with a free guided walk along Frost Gully Brook to view the former dam sites that the Merrymeeting Bay chapter removed in partnership with the Freeport Conservation Trust. Walkers meet at the Burr Cemetery parking lot at 56 Durham Road and are advised to wear tick protection and knee-high rubber boots. The walk is hosted by Nate Hicks and Matt Streeter, a professional consultant to environmental organizations and immediate past president of the Maine council of Trout Unlimited.
The afternoon program at the community center includes Tom Pero reading from "Salter," published by Wild River Press, and a presentation by Francis Smith on the restoration of the Quashnet River on Cape Cod. A panel discussion follows, featuring Merry Gallagher, a native fish conservation biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, along with Trout Unlimited members including Hicks, discussing sea-run trout river projects in Maine. Chapters from across the state will also set up tabletop presentations showcasing their conservation work.
What exactly is a salter? It is a brook trout -- Salvelinus fontinalis, Maine's state fish -- that spends part of its life in saltwater before returning to coastal freshwater rivers to spawn. In the ocean the fish take on a silvery hue better suited to the marine environment, which is why the trout Lambert pulled from the draining Frost Gully impoundment looked the way it did. The Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition notes that before the Industrial Revolution, hundreds of rivers and streams from Long Island to Maine held populations of these fish, prized for their flavor, size and strength. They became the focus of what the coalition calls America's first sport fishery; during the 1800s, exclusive fishing clubs sprang up on the more famous salter streams of Massachusetts and Long Island. Daniel Webster, the Secretary of State and orator, was among the anglers who fished Cape Cod's salter waters, as was Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's angling uncle.
By the turn of the century, dam building and habitat degradation had sent the fishery into decline, and salter populations were reduced to a remnant of their former abundance. Wild River Press describes the fish as having once spawned in freshwater rivers from the mouth of the Hudson River to Hudson Bay, and notes that salters have now virtually disappeared from their historic haunts south of Maine. That is part of why the Freeport event matters: Maine is home to the most intact native brook trout waters in the country, according to the Maine Council of Trout Unlimited, which counts roughly 1,500 members across six chapters. The council points to more than 1,000 legacy dams as a source of habitat fragmentation, alongside climate change and development pressure.
Frost Gully Brook is a small, spring-fed tributary of the Harraseeket River, which flows into Casco Bay, threading through a mix of public land and private property a short distance from the L.L.Bean flagship store. Three dams stood on the system, built between the late 1800s and the 1950s to provide the town with backup fire protection and water supply. Two sat on the Freeport Conservation Trust's 13-acre Frost Gully Woods property; the third belonged to Maine Water Company. The removal took five days of construction after seven years of planning, a partnership that drew in the conservation trust, the Merrymeeting Bay chapter of Trout Unlimited, Maine Water, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Gulf of Maine Coastal Program, the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, and stream restoration specialist Alex Abbott.
When the dams came out, the brook ran freely for the first time in more than a century. "Just the sound of the stream flowing," Carrie Kinne, the conservation trust's executive director, recalled of watching the lowermost dam come down. "That was the first thing that really resonated with me." Jeff Bush, president of the Merrymeeting Bay chapter, put the stakes this way: "Having Frost Gully Brook free of its dams certainly will allow these salters to run its entire length, but now cold water can run from its headwaters to the bay." The dams, he noted, had heated the water they stored to dangerous levels, depleting it of the dissolved oxygen that salters and other creatures need. Maine Water president Mark Vannoy called the project a way to sustain "this precious water resource in its natural state for current and future generations to enjoy."
The book at the center of Saturday's event has its own origin story, and it reaches back further than the Freeport dams. Fifty years before dam removal on California's Klamath River and Maine's Penobscot River drew national attention, a small band of what Wild River Press calls radical dam-busters -- inspired by Edward Abbey's novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang" -- took pickaxes and sledgehammers to an obsolete dam blocking the Quashnet River in Massachusetts. The year was 1976, the country's bicentennial. The effort was led, in the manner of Abbey's fictional Hayduke, by a real-life Vietnam veteran and career plumber from Falmouth named Francis Smith. Smith is the same Francis Smith scheduled to speak in Freeport about the Quashnet's restoration, and his life story and those of other river advocates form what the publisher calls the beating heart of "Salter."
The book, subtitled "The improbable return of the magical sea-run brook trout to the little rivers of Cape Cod," runs 257 pages in color, with hundreds of photographs and historical maps, and carries an introduction by Chris Wood, president of Trout Unlimited. It traces a decades-long environmental revolution on New England's coastal rivers, from volunteers swinging sledgehammers to today's sophisticated investments of public and private dollars in restoring biodiversity to coastal streams, as obsolete dams come out and abandoned cranberry bogs are returned to wild wetlands. The tour behind it began Sept. 30 in Rhode Island, moved through Cape Cod for October river walks, and heads north to Down East Maine. Freeport's stop is one of the Maine legs.
The Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition, which has helped publicize the tour, makes a point that lands squarely on Frost Gully: given a chance, through stream improvement and dam removal, salter populations can rebound quickly, with fish growing to a typical 12 to 14 inches in a few years. The coalition's founder, Warren Winders, framed the broader surprise this way: how many people know there are wild brook trout in southeastern Massachusetts, or that they may be passing over a brook trout stream on the way to and from work? In Freeport, the answer is now a little more visible -- a brook running free past the edge of downtown, and a Saturday set aside to talk about the fish that use it.
For more information about Salter Saturday, contact Gene McKenna at 207-512-5610. For details about the river walk, contact Nate Hicks at 207-756-9364.