A fishway planned for the historic Whiting Mill Pond dam will restore access to important habitat for a variety of native fish species while enabling the dam to remain in place as a landmark feature in the town and retaining the pond's reservoir for firefighting purposes. The outcome is viewed as a satisfactory resolution by the parties involved, some of whom have been working on the project for nearly 10 years.
      "It's moving along. We're getting the permits. We're ready," says Steve Pressley, chair of select board in Whiting. "The townspeople of every generation are happy with what we're doing."
      The stone dam has been a feature of the area since it was built in 1830 by Charles Perry of Eastport. A fishway was added in 1860 to enable fish to pass downstream and spawn. A fire in the 1950s destroyed the attached mill, and by the 1960s the fishway was no longer operational due to a lack of upkeep.
      The pond created by the dam has been particularly important to the town in times of fire emergencies, including the Bell Mountain forest fire in April 1985 that was started by arson in Edmunds and led to the loss of 1,000 forested acres, including 400 acres of the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, after burning for four days.
      In more recent years, ownership of the dam was passed to the Downeast Salmon Federation (DSF), which viewed it as an obstruction to fish passage. In 2016, a citizen's petition was filed to protect to the dam, and in 2021 DSF offered to sell the dam to the town for $1 if they agreed to maintain it and build a fishway. The agreement was made, and plans began progressing forward to design the project and raise the necessary funds. In 2023, the project received $2.9 million as part of a federal omnibus bill under President Biden. The town arranged for an additional $600,000, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust (MCHT) committed $200,000 more.
      Even with funds secured, the project faced some turbulence. During the initial round of bidding for the project -- initially proposed as building the fishway and earth stabilization work -- all of the bids came in high. The project was subsequently divided into two parts, with the project engineer working to reduce costs, and put back out to bid. Contractor W.P. Davis Excavation of Hampton, N.H., put in the low bid on both projects, enabling negotiations for handling the project as a whole under the target figure of $3.6 million. At a town meeting on April 14, residents affirmed their support to proceed with the proposed plan, although the final contract has yet to be signed. Once signed, construction on the project is anticipated to begin in July and be finished by December.
      "It's been a big drawn out project," Pressley summarizes. "We have good people working on both sides. It takes time to get things right."
      All in all, it's a project that successfully found the middle ground, says Jacob van de Sande of MCHT. "To be honest, as a fisheries biologist, I would have preferred dam removal, but I understand the town agreed to take on the upkeep of the dam and to commit to the fishway, so we're glad to support the town in that process."
      As part of the collaboration, MCHT has hired a landscape architect to work with the town to improve access to the fishway. The current setup for firefighting access is not ideal, but the new design will include a pumphouse and a drive in and turnaround area for the fire trucks.
      With the vertical slot fishway in place, van de Sande says, fish such as alewives, blueback herring, brook trout, American eels and Atlantic salmon will be able to go past the dam. "The big focus is alewives," van de Sande says, estimating there to be enough habitat for 500,000 in the soon to be accessible waterway.
      There are plans to develop an alewife harvest site and "really make it accessible" to the public, van de Sande says, along with building an outdoor classroom complete with granite stone seating and cameras and monitors live-streaming fish passage on site. In the future, the goal is to broadcast the camera feed to the internet so people around the world will be able to tune in and see the fish pass.
      "We're pretty excited about it," says van de Sande. "We'd like to get the young people and the old people and everybody back out watching the fish again. It will be fun to have that in our backyard. Maybe we'll be talking about an alewife festival in Whiting next year."
      With Whiting Mill Pond dam soon to have its fishway in place, MCHT has set its sights on the next two dams in the watershed, the Orange River Flowage dam and the Rocky Lake outlet dam, with fishway proposals now in the works. Fortunately, the dams are sequentially smaller, with the Mill Pond dam being 18 feet, the dam at Orange River seven feet and Rocky Lake three feet.
      That will leave only one dam impeding passageway on the river. Located at the outlet to Roaring Lake, it is privately owned, and no agreement for a fishway accommodation has yet been established.