I call it the “rock of ages” because, when I first came upon it during a float trip on the North Branch of the Potomac River 30 years ago, it resounded silently with the mighty power of time. The massive rock, millions of years old, rose 70 feet above us, just downstream of a bend in the river and upstream of a place called Black Oak, in Western Maryland’s Allegany County.
I remember my feelings and thoughts when our raft drifted toward the rock: jaw-dropping awe, a sense of privilege for having been there and a wish that my family, friends and more of our fellow Marylanders could see the place.
It’s not easy to do that.
At nearly 100 miles, the North Branch is one of the state’s longest and most beautiful rivers, and it comes with a good story that should please Maryland taxpayers.
But public access is limited. I’m a firm believer in treading softly on Earth, but I think the North Branch could use another boat ramp or two along its many miles, and there’s a dormant rail bed above its banks near Westernport that might one day make a good trail for hikers and bikers.
If any of that happens, the state should erect a sign that says something like this: “These once-polluted waters were restored through the efforts of Maryland’s progressive, conservation-minded government.”
The North Branch of the Potomac forms Maryland’s craggy border with West Virginia. Its trickling headwaters are in a remote place known as the Fairfax Stone. Several creeks feed the North Branch as it flows to its confluence with the South Branch and the main Potomac near Cumberland.
The North Branch was once so polluted that, by the 1980s, state officials declared it biologically dead.
It was coal that killed it.
In the 19th century, men in Garrett and Allegany counties fell thousands of trees and dug deep into the ground for coal. The mining was vast, and it went on for decades. In the process, mining companies created massive subterranean reservoirs that held millions of gallons of acidic water. When that water gushed up from the ground and into little brooks and runs, it threw everything out of balance and killed virtually all life in the North Branch.
By the mid-20th century, many surface and deep mines in Maryland and West Virginia had been abandoned. An estimated 118,000 pounds of mine acid seeped each day into the North Branch.
In the 1980s, biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources got the idea that the North Branch could be raised from the dead. It was a middle-aged Naval Academy graduate and Navy veteran named Bob Bachman who believed a Swedish innovation could make the North Branch healthy again — maybe even healthy enough for trout, the most fragile of freshwater fish.
Bachman, known by many as “Dr. Bob,” had spent four years studying trout behavior from an observation tower overlooking a creek in Pennsylvania. His research made Bachman famous among fisheries experts and anglers.
Hired by Maryland’s DNR, Bachman took on a daunting challenge: neutralizing the acid flow into the North Branch.
Dr. Bob, his biologists and employees of Maryland’s Bureau of Mines decided on a system, still in its infancy at the time, that had been developed by the Swedes to restore streams damaged by acid rain. It was called lime dosing.
In the woods of Western Maryland, the state installed tall cylindrical hoppers — imagine silos — and perpetual motion machinery that dropped pulverized limestone into the licks and brooks that cascaded into the North Branch. These regular doses of creamy, acid-neutralizing water served as a kind of antacid for the big river.
It worked. In fact, considering the duration and scope of the North Branch’s degradation, the patient had a relatively speedy recovery.
In the early 1990s, the state stocked baby smallmouth bass in the river. They lived. They grew. They even reproduced — the first time that had happened in the North Branch in decades. Eventually, the waters of the North Branch became healthy enough to sustain trout. They are thriving and reproducing over several miles of the river.
There are impressive vistas all along the North Branch, through Potomac-Garrett State Forest and the town of Kitzmiller, past cascading brooks, down to the massive lake created by the Jennings Randolph Dam, an Army Corps of Engineers project named after the late Democratic senator from West Virginia.
At the dam, there’s a trail named after another Democratic senator, the late Paul Sarbanes of Maryland. The Sarbanes trail provides one of the few public access points to the North Branch from the Maryland side.
Downstream of the dam, the North Branch meets the Savage River and their clear waters flow through the towns of Luke and Westernport on the way to Cumberland.
The shuttered paper mill in Luke is a massive eyesore, and it’s not clear what will happen to it. Officials in Allegany County would like to see the site remain industrial and create jobs since hundreds were lost when the plant closed in 2019.
But it seems to me that the area’s biggest asset is the North Branch, and, with more public access, there could be more jobs — restaurants, cafes, a brewery, a bike shop, a kayak shop, more river guides offering float trips for fishing, birding and photography — and more Marylanders could see their beautiful, restored river.
