Cover photo by Chris Hartlove

Going With the Flow

Historic dams are being demolished or altered to allow fish to return to their historic spawning grounds. Is there another way?

By WAYNE CURTIS

Wil Foshag slides open a window and peers out the second floor of Heishman's Mill, a stone and red clapboard gristmill built around 1800 by a family of Swiss Mennonites just west of Carlisle, Pa. The Conodoguinet Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna River, is about 150 feet wide where it flows both around and beneath the mill, and hypnotically smooth sheets of water roar over a six-foot dam, churning up a white spume that folds back upon itself. On this third day of spring, the curiously sweet smell of manure on adjacent fields wafts past on the season's initial balmy breezes. It is just the sort of day the first fish return each year. Usually trash fish like suckers, they make it only as far as this dam, their passage upstream blocked. "Sometimes," Foshag says, "the water's so thick with them it looks almost black." But not today. After scanning the river for a minute or two, Foshag steps back and closes the window. "Maybe the water needs to warm up a few degrees," he says.

Foshag is not the only one scouting for fish. Biologists and anglers are watching to see whether the local fish are joined by American shad and river herring, two migrant species that are native to the Susquehanna and have been heavily stocked in the Conodoguinet the past several years. If so, they'll join the suckers at the base of the dam, frustrated in their attempts to keep moving upstream.

The mill sits atop a pair of elegant stone arches, through which the water that powered the works courses. Inside, it's full of unevenly worn boards, inscrutable machinery, unfilled flour sacks, and great piles of accumulated matter, some historic, much not. "It's breeding at night," says Foshag. "I've got to have an auction." The mill processed grain until 1958, and its machinery, though inoperable, remains in place, including a pair of c. 1908 water-powered turbines that haven taken the place of a water wheel. It's one of the last wholly intact mill-and-dam complexes in this part of Pennsylvania, and since 1969 Foshag, a 74-year-old former helicopter engineer who lives in the miller's house across the road, has spent much of his time and savings to keep the mill upright and the dam sound. This effort has involved fending off floods, fires, rodents, rot, and the unwanted attentions of what Foshag quaintly calls "the American teenager."

Lately, however, Foshag has been grappling with a less tangible force than flood or fire. Advocates for removing dams and allowing fish to migrate freely have brought their campaign from the main rivers up into the tributaries and creeks, effectively lobbying to tear down dams from coast to coast. "What's good for the historic resource is often not good for habitat and water quality," Giovanna Peebles, the archaeologist with the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, explained at a conference on dam removal in 1999. After nearly three centuries of frenzied dam building, the United States now appears intent on tearing some dams down.

Anytime the nation finds itself with a focus for demolition, there's a good chance it's time to sit up and take notice. "The anti-dam people are powerful and organized and very focused, and the historic preservation people aren't even thinking about dams," Peebles said when contacted. Preservationists are accustomed to feuding with developers, not environmentalists. So what happens when the antagonists are those who are more often allies in efforts to curb sprawl?

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