Great Falls (Connecticut River)

About

Great Falls is a waterfall along the Connecticut River between Walpole, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont. It has also been called Bellows Falls, and its Abenaki name is Kitchee Pontegu, which means "great falls". Great Falls became its official name, based on local usage, in 2016. It drops 52 feet (16 m), and the village of Bellows Falls (within the town of Rockingham, Vermont) was established next to it, to take advantage of its water power. Previously, the main settlement in town, Rockingham Village, was on a high point of land overlooking the Williams River, with no potential for water power. The Bellows Falls Canal, one of the first canals built in the United States, was dug by a British-owned company from 1791-1802 to bypass Great Falls for river travel. After it was widened and deepened in 1926-28 to bring more water to a new hydroelectric plant, increasing its flow from 1 million gallons per minute to 4.2 million gallons per minute, there was less water going over Great Falls, except during late winter and spring high flow (see fourth photo at right). In order to make room in the river below the tail race for this much greater volume of water, extensive blasting of the bedrock of the river bed was done in winter 1928, and the stone removed was used to extend the shoreline on the Vermont side, just downriver of the tail race. Three workers were killed when the dy

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.