After years of planning, fundraising and ripping up concrete, the site of a former sawmill along the Acushnet River in New Bedford’s North End is now a public park. Some 200 people turned out Friday to celebrate the effort to revitalize the 19-acre site and make it available for recreational purposes.
The Acushnet River, which divides the cities of New Bedford and Acushnet and flows into Buzzards Bay, has been many things to the people who have lived beside it -- from getting its name from the Wampanoag people, to becoming the site of mills and factories during the Industrial Revolution.
At Friday's event, Mark Rasmussen of the Buzzards Bay Coallition, welcomed the river back.
"This river's been here for a long while. But as a community, we lost it for awhile," Rasmussen said. "We turned our back on it. We lined its banks with mills and factories, landfills and junkyards. We destroyed its shoreline, erased its wetlands. We turned our homes away from it. We didn't even want to look at it."
Brendan Annett, vice president for watershed protection at the Buzzards Bay Coalition, said the New Bedford-based environmental group spearheaded the $3.8-million restoration effort.
"The area was broken. It had been developed for more than a century. It had been used as an industrial site. It had provided jobs and industry for a long time, but that time had passed," Annett said. "The site was now dilapidated…some of the large buildings were being rented out. The owners of the property were considering selling it."
The Buzzards Bay Coalition acquired the site in 2008 and has spent the last two years removing buildings and pavement from the former sawmill operation. Workers also pulled out the old cement seawalls and revetments that lined the Acushnet River near the old sawmill.
Annett said pollution cleanup in nearby New Bedford Harbor is actually what helped get the project off the ground.
"We were able to get a grant from the New Bedford Harbor Trustee Council, which manages the penalty funds from the PCB pollution of the harbor," he said. "So the grant was given to this project, because it restored a number of resources that were equivalent to some of the resources that were lost by the pollution of the river."
The restored riverbank now provides habitat for birds, waterfowl, and other wildlife. The park also features a mile or more of walking trails. Annett said he’s hoping residents of New Bedford’s North End will take advantage of the revitalized green space in their backyard, which is now called Sawmill Park.
"Sort of, 'if you build it they will come',” he said. "And in this case, it’s “'If you un-build it, they will come back'.”
