Rewilding a run

The story repeats itself around the country: Salmon vs. dams, dams vs. salmon.

Dams usually win.

But what happened in the eastern Adirondack Park town of Willsboro is remarkable, a sign of how quickly the balance can change.

The old Saw Mill Dam stood in the middle of town decades after the mill there had closed. It stood for something about the town and what it had been, but it also stood in the way of what had been there, swimming in the Boquet River, long before there was a town.

There used to be a lot of salmon in the Boquet—so many that one early account of the river says 500 were caught there in a single afternoon. But intense fishing like that, along with pollution and dams like the one in Willsboro, wiped them out. Atlantic salmon faded from the Boquet and every other river draining