The River Works
Nearer the bridge the land is lower, and it shows the effects of frequent inundation, but not of scour. A great sand bar lies in the curve of the stream, and the low parallel ridges suggest that they, too, were awash in the Connecticut before its eastern bank encroached so far upon the town of Hadley. The tongue of land which serves as Northampton’s airport is a succession of bars and abandoned channels which record the migration of the river away from its old bank along Bridge Street. The Connecticut is robbing Hadley to pay Northampton, but there was a time when Northampton was pilfered, too.
Swales line the landscape as far as Hadley; and each year, at the time of high water, they must now be content with the meager overflow, where once they sped the entire stream upon its southward course. But even now, in flood, their original function may be restored. For the swale just west of Hadley was a roaring torrent in 1938, 1936, and 1896. Indeed, it threatened to appropriate the entire stream, and each of the great curving hollows that furrow the lowland are scour-channels which were made at other times.
Fig. 1. The Connecticut River undercuts the Hadley bank at Hockanum.
Fig. 2. Natural levees border the Connecticut River south of the Sunderland Bridge.
The river has moved at will from one side of its alluvial plain to the other, and its threats to change its course are not to be taken lightly. Until 1830 it flowed past Northampton, around the great ox-bow to Easthampton and then back to the watergap between Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke. It served as the main line of communication to the Atlantic seaboard and was a much travelled route. In the spring of that year high water breached the narrow neck of land between the two ends of the meander loop, and practically overnight the route to New London was shortened by three miles. Although the event was not a source of rejoicing to the landowners, Northampton declared a day of thanksgiving because they were now, thanks be to Providence, three miles nearer the sea. How often the river has changed its course may never be determined, but the floodplain is grooved with swampy or silt-filled ox-bow lakes, not only near Northampton, but all the way from Brattleboro, Vermont, to Middletown, Connecticut. They tell of older shifts in the course of a river which still displays its brute power within the limits of its alluvial plain.
The inundation of 1936 did more than scour the river’s floodplain; it left thick deposits of sand and silt upon many of the fields. Each preceding flood has done the same sort of thing, dropping coarse sand in greatest abundance on the banks where the river flowed straightest. Flood by flood, the deposit has risen higher on these favored sites, where the swift main current slackens as it spreads over the broad, flat plain. Today the banks form natural levees sloping away from the river at many points southward from the Sunderland Bridge.
Just when the river started to shift back and forth across its alluvial plain is not revealed, but it was long before the white man penetrated the country. Indian graves and campsites have been laid bare as the high water of each new flood has removed the silt left during earlier inundations. The sites rarely yield any implement brought by the Europeans; they record long years of Indian occupation in the land called Norwottock, a land in which the red man found a river which temperamentally shifted its course in response to periodic floods.