Most cities have a river of some sort running through them, but not many have a river with a 3-mile-long appendix.

“When I get to the end, I always wish I could keep going. But you hit the concrete, that’s the streets, the end of the line,” is how Bill James, of Nashua, put it after a recent kayak tour of the Nashua River Canal, which starts at the Mine Falls dam behind Stellos Stadium and dead-ends at Pine Street Extension in the Millyard.

James, an Air Force veteran whose enthusiasm for kayaking in urban waters borders on obsession, was the newspaper’s guide last summer during an aquatic examination of the downtown stretch of the Nashua River, so we thought we’d repeat the process on the unusual stretch of water that zigzags parallel to the river for 3 miles, even though the two bodies of water are, sadly, cut off from each other.

The Nashua River Canal isn’t exactly a hidden gem, since thousands of people see it every day when visiting Mine Falls Park or driving along Ledge Street, but it’s easy to forget how unusual it is.

Many New England cities dug canals for transportation or to power Industrial Revolution mills, but most of those were filled in and paved over when they became obsolete – hence, the number of places that have a Canal Street in their road system.

Nashua did some burying, too. The city had a second canal that’s long gone – it was near Nashua’s own Canal Street – and in the 1970s, the eastern end of the Nashua River Canal was covered as part of urban renewal. But most of that canal survived, largely because it runs through the huge park that some regard as the heart of Nashua.

The result is an unusual place for a paddling trip – no gas-powered motors are allowed, although
boats with electric trolling motors can occasionally be seen – that has issues, but is well worth a visit.

“It’s your own path to come explore,” James said. “You don’t have to be on foot, you don’t have to be on a bike. It’s a different way to see things.”

Mixed bag

The canal is half wild and half tamed; beautiful and quiet in spots, trashy and loud in others; sometimes too deep to easily measure from a boat and sometimes so shallow that canoes bottom out.

It’s home to snapping turtles, blue herons, bass and pickerel as long as your forearm, and more than a few shopping carts.

“It’s a peaceful, beautiful setting in the midst of an urbanized area,” said Dan Jaracz, who lives in Clocktower Place near the canal’s eastern end.

He was interviewed Tuesday while walking the hiking path on the canal’s north bank, accompanied by friend’s dog, a Lab named Finnegan who really, really wanted to jump into the reporter’s canoe.

Especially pretty is Oxbow Lake, a remnant of the Nashua River’s former path that’s separate from both river and canal, forming a marshy area favored by waterfowl, including nesting swans.

The canal does have problems, notably an invasion of water-clogging milfoil, but the days are long gone when it and the adjacent river changed color depending on what was going on in the textile mills. Industrial waste and raw sewage no longer are dumped into local waterways.

Jaracz said he walks, hikes and bikes through Mine Falls Park a lot – “You don’t meet an angry person or a bitter person on this trail” – and regularly sees people on the water in kayaks or canoes. Still, the river is used at least as much by fishermen on the bank.

Ed Klinch, of Crown Street, is one of those; he shows up for fishing “four or five days a week” when the weather’s nice.

The canal is great for him because the handicap-accessible trail runs close to the water.

“It’s easy access in the wheelchair, except for when the weeds get high,” he said.

Canal-bank vegetation is cut twice a year by contractors; Klinch wishes it happened more often.

That hasn’t kept him from hauling in some sizable fish, including a 23-inch largemouth bass, whose photo he keeps on his smartphone for display.

David Ramos, of Jefferson Street, is another regular with a fishing rod.

“I don’t eat them,” he said. “I take them to people and they eat them.

“There’s good fishing; New Hampshire has good fishing,” he added happily.

Up by Pine Street was yet another fisherman: Donavan Frost, 13, a student at Pennichuck Junior High. He was trying his luck at the end of the canal, alongside the overflow pipe that runs down to the Nashua River. Although the water may look stagnant and a bit trashy up near Ledge Street, he said there’s plenty of life in it.

“I see turtles, too,” he said, prodding his pole tip amid the milfoil weeds (an unfortunate part of the canal’s ecosystem) to demonstrate. “There’s a snapper!”

The 3-mile canal was designed to bring the river to the mills operated by the Nashua Manufacturing Co., where it powered the looms for close to a century. The other canal in the city, long since covered, was built for transportation, to carry goods around what is now called the Jackson Falls before railroads were built.

The Nashua Canal was dug by hand and by mule, according to local histories, and was in operation by 1830.

Mill Pond at the western end of the canal was created by flooding when the gatehouse was built in 1886 by the Nashua Manufacturing Co. The gatehouse is not only on the National Register of Historic Places, it also has its own Wikipedia article.

Hard to access

There’s one big obstacle to boating on the Nashua Canal, and it’s the same obstacle to boating on the Nashua River downtown: shortage of access.

The best public boat access on the river is behind Stellos Stadium. That’s upstream of the Mine Falls dam, so it’s blocked from the canal, as well as from the river downtown.

The only place to get into or out of the canal is via the Mill Pond boat launch next to Conway Arena, just off Exit 5 of the Everett Turnpike. For all practical purposes, you’re trapped on the water unless you retrace your steps.

“There’s nowhere real good to stop and get out,” James said. “There are a couple of little spots that if you really had to get out, go up on the bank and take some pictures, you could. … But the banks are pretty steep.”

Particularly frustrating is the fact that the city’s two waterways are cut off from each other: You can’t get to the river from the canal or vice versa because the Mine Falls hydropower dam blocks the connection in the west and Pine Street Extension blocks it in the east.

The only way to get a boat from the canal to the river is to do some difficult portaging, to use the term for hauling boats from one waterway to another.

“You have to pull your boat up some rather large hills and then right back down them to get to the river – it’s not an easy portage,” James said.

Because the canal is higher than the river, sometimes by as much as 30 feet, it’s almost impossible to portage the other way, from the river to the canal.

Water connections exist between the two bodies – otherwise, the canal would be totally stagnant – but none can be traversed by a boat.

Water enters the canal at the dam at a rate of at least 10 cubic feet per second – not much for a body this size – an amount established by the federal license for the hydropower facility. It can also enter from drainpipes that carry water from street drains: Several such pipes flow into Mill Pond, and one each connects from Perry Avenue, Simon Street and Whipple Street.

Water flows out of the canal in two places.

The first overflow occurs at two small weirs, or adjustable barriers, under a concrete footbridge halfway along Mill Pond. This overflow creates a little brook that tumbles down the bank into the river.

The main exit for water is the overflow pipe at Pine Street Extension, the canal’s eastern end.

Water flows through chain-link fence into a huge, 4-foot-wide pipe. That pipe runs underground a short distance to the river, emptying beneath the Picker Building, just west of Clocktower Place.

Future

One thing that differentiates the canal from the river is its lack of any real current. Water flows sluggishly through the canal, at best.

This has advantages: You never have to paddle upstream, which is a relief; it makes things attractive for waterfowl; and it helps the canal freeze over in winter. But the disadvantages are obvious.

“It’s not a crystal-clear, swimmable waterway,” said James, gesturing at the canal. “I have swum in the river – both accidentally and on purpose – but not this one. If (the water) moved a little bit better, it would be a lot more fun.”

The only way to fix this would be to increase the canal’s flow by enlarging the downstream connection between it and the river. As far as anybody can recall, there have never been any serious attempts to do this.

Certainly nothing has been attempted to make it possible to paddle from one to the other, which would require a significant engineering project.

The Mine Falls Park Advisory Committee and the city Parks and Recreation Department oversee the canal, but they have their hands full just keeping it clear of trash and invasive weeds; they’re unlikely to indulge in major waterway infrastructure projects. The Nashua River Canal is likely to remain an appendix.

But a pretty nice one, all the same.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashua
telegraph.com. Also, follow Brooks on Twitter (@GraniteGeek).