There was a time within many people's lifetimes when almost no one would have fished the confluence of the Kennebec and Sebasticook rivers in Winslow.

Tanneries, factories and mills dumped municipal sewage into the Kennebec and its tributaries, fouling the waters as they flowed through Augusta toward Merrymeeting Bay. In Hartland, the Sebasticook River below the tannery ran with the color of dyes used on leather.

It was the same with other rivers across Maine and the nation. Once pristine, filled with fish, home to mammals and birds, the living, breathing Kennebec had been smothered to death by a flood of sewage and bark, poisoned by chemicals

Things began to change 35 years ago, when Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie and others introduced a bill that would become the landmark Clean Water Act. Muskie also sponsored amendments to the bill in 1977.

One of the nation's most significant pieces of environmental legislation, the act gave the state and local governments, and dedicated environmentalists the tools to begin a cleanup that would almost immediately begin yielding results.

Today, the public enjoys fishing, boating and even swimming on the Kennebec. Property values have increased. Developers are cashing in by renovating old mills as condos and retail space.

"It's almost impossible now to visualize what (the Kennebec) was then," said Clinton "Bill" Townsend of Canaan, a pioneer in the clean-water movement since the late 1950s. "It's literally the difference between night and day when it was an open sewer, back in the 1960s."

"There was the fish kill and the stench so bad in the river that they couldn't even open the windows at the Statehouse, and paint was peeling off houses in Richmond," he said.

In those days, Townsend limited his fishing to local streams or to the Kennebec above Skowhegan.

"I didn't fish below the Shawmut dam and I didn't fish much in Skowhegan," he said. "Everybody knew it was horribly polluted, and of course the log drives were still going on."

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