From “The White Rose Road”
by Sarah Orne Jewett
Sarah Orne Jewett, the celebrated author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, was a native of South Berwick. She lived all her life in her father's house by the Great Works River, a tributary of the Salmon Falls River. In this excerpt from an 1881 essay recounting her excursions on horseback, she laments the degradation of the river she knew so well growing up.
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nce, as you came close to the river, you were sure to find fishermen scattered along,--sometimes I myself have been discovered; but it is not much use to go fishing anymore. If some public-spirited person would kindly be the Frank Buckland of New England, and try to have the laws enforced that protect the inland fisheries, he would do his country great service. Years ago, there were so many salmon that, as an enthusiastic friend once assured me, ‘you could walk across on them below the falls;’ but now they are unknown, simply because certain substances which would enrich the farms are thrown from factories and tanneries into our clear New England streams. Good river fish are growing very scarce. The smelts, and bass, and shad have all left this upper branch of the Piscataqua, as the salmon left it long ago, and the supply of one necessary sort of good cheap food is lost to a growing community, for the lack of a little thought and care in the factory companies and saw-mills, and the building in some cases of fish-ways over the dams. I think that the need of preaching against this bad economy is very great. The sight of a proud lad with a string of undersized trout will scatter half the idlers in town into the pastures next day, but everybody patiently accepts the depopulation of a fine clear river, where the tide comes fresh from the sea to be tainted by the spoiled stream, which started from its mountain sources as pure as heart could wish. Man has done his best to ruin the world he lives in, one is tempted to say at impulsive first thought; but after all, as I mounted the last hill before reaching the village, the houses took on a new look of comfort and pleasantness; the fields that I knew so well were a fresher green than before, the sun was down, and the provocations of the day seemed very slight compared to the satisfaction. I believed that with a little more time we should grow wiser about our fish and other things beside (277-78).
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Sarah Orne Jewett. "The White Rose Road." Country By-Ways.  Boston and New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 1881. 

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