When talking about the Nashua River in New Hampshire and central Massachusetts, the name that comes to the mind is Marion Stoddart. Marion Stoddart became the forerunner of the Nashua River’s revival. This staunch and persistent advocate for the Nashua River formed the Nashua River Clean-Up Committee.

Thirty years back, heavy pollution started in the historic Nashua River and its tributaries by the neighboring paper, shoe and textile factories. The wastes released by the factories made the river and its main water source poisonous. By 1965, the river became the most polluted river in US and it was classified U, meaning unfit for receiving any further sewage.

Marion and her family lived very close to the river and they could smell the polluted fumes. Seeing the river dying in front of her, she took the biggest challenge of her life to clean up the water of Nashua. Marion made a dramatic success when she mobilized a community to clean up the river and restore the fauna of its banks.

Marion Stoddart led her supporters with a two-fold vision for Nashua River. Cleaning up the river was the first one followed by protecting the land along its banks. In order to aid their efforts for restoring and protecting the Nashua, the Nashua River Watershed Association or NRWA was formed by the Clean-Up Committee formed in 1969. The main objective of the association was to work researching and producing a long-range plan that aimed to improve the health of the watershed.

The Clean Water Act, the construction of the eight new sewage treatment plants as well as the efforts of the Nashua River have helped in cleaning up much of the point source pollution from the mills. The conservation of more than 8,000 acres of land throughout the watershed along with 85 miles of greenway all along the riverbanks is representative of the protection of more than half of the riverbank miles of the watershed.

In the process of cleaning up the mess of the Nashua River, she won a United Nations awards and was even profiled in National Geographic.