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Clean Water: Muskie and the Environment

Summary of river condition, Lewiston, 1948

Summary of river condition, Lewiston, 1948

Item 25720 info
Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library

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.