Before Edmund S. Muskie went to the U.S. Senate in 1959, the problems of the Androscoggin River had come to the fore through the work of Dr. Walter Lawrance, a Bates College chemistry professor.
Since the 1880s when paper mills began creating pulp with a sulfite chemical process, water downstream of paper mills often smelled awful and was too polluted to use.
A study of the Androscoggin in the early 1940s showed that it had almost no dissolved oxygen and therefore could not support fish or aquatic life.