Thoreau’s Sudbury River: ‘dammed and cursed’

In 1859, Henry David Thoreau recorded a phrase used by Wayland farmer Col. David Heard to describe an issue with the Sudbury River: “dammed at both ends and cursed between them.” The words captured the problem confronting the river’s riparian farmers. A mill dam or reservoir above or below them could release, retain or slow the water without regard for people and the land elsewhere along the river. That conflict began well before Thoreau’s lifetime. Christopher Osgood built a wooden crib dam for a village gristmill at Billerica Falls on the Concord River (which the Sudbury and Assaset rivers join to form) around 1710, on the site of today’s Talbot Mills dam. The structure was removed and rebuilt several times. The present masonry dam dates to 1828. Concord residents protested the early dam because it blocked migratory fish that were important to the colonial subsistence economy. A colonial commission reviewed the dispute, and the dam was demolished in 1722. Osgood sued, lost and appealed. He was allowed to rebuild if…