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23-592: The Acushnet River is the largest river, 8.6 miles (13.8 km) long, flowing into Buzzards Bay in southeastern Massachusetts , in the United States . The name "Acushnet" comes from the Wampanoag or Algonquian word, " Cushnea ", meaning "as far as the waters", a word that was used by the original owners of the land in describing the extent of the parcel they intended to sell to the English settlers from

46-490: A new commercial scale mariculture technique. In 1991, towns located on Buzzards Bay suffered the worst effects from the storm surge of Hurricane Bob . The Buzzards Bay disaster happened on April 27, 2003. An oil spill of 98,000 gallons of oil leaked from a barge , destroying much of the shellfish business and killing many birds . Ra Ra Riot 's John Pike's body was found in Buzzard's Bay. He had disappeared from

69-527: A party in Fairhaven, Massachusetts in June 2007, and was found several weeks later in the bay. On January 7, 2018, due to the 2017–18 North American cold wave , part of the bay froze over. Home port A vessel 's home port is the port at which it is based, which may not be the same as its port of registry shown on its registration documents and lettered on the stern of the ship's hull . In

92-542: Is a historically significant port on Buzzards Bay; the Port of New Bedford the world's most successful whaling port during the early- and mid-19th century, and has been the nation's most productive fishing port for the last several years. Buzzards Bay was created during the latter portion of the Pleistocene epoch through the interplay of glacial and oceanic processes. Beginning fifty thousand to seventy thousand years ago,

115-787: Is a popular destination for fishing , boating , and tourism . Buzzards Bay is often considered the finest sailing location on the East Coast and is frequently compared in terms of sailing conditions to San Francisco Bay. Since 1914, Buzzards Bay has been connected to Cape Cod Bay by the Cape Cod Canal . In 1988, under the Clean Water Act , the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts designated Buzzards Bay to

138-596: Is flanked by New Bedford and Fairhaven. Shortly after the river leaves Acushnet, a larger bridge, the Coggeshall Street Bridge, crosses between Fairhaven and New Bedford. The fifth bridge is one that carries a large limited-access highway, Interstate 195 , across the river, about 150 metres south of the Coggeshall Street span. The sixth and last bridge is actually a complex of three small bridges that hopscotch from islet to islet across

161-836: The American Revolution , the Battle off Fairhaven , occurred in Buzzards Bay when patriots retrieved two vessels that were captured by the British sloop of war Falcon . On 14 May 1775, American Captain Daniel Egery and Capt. Nathaniel Pope of Fairhaven in the sloop Success (40 tons, 30 men) retrieved two vessels captured by the British crew of Captain John Linzee (Lindsey), Royal Navy commander of HMS Falcon (14 guns, 110 men). Crew member Noah Stoddard and

184-641: The Boston Tea Party .) On the eastern (Fairhaven) shore, the mouth of the river is guarded by Fort Phoenix , a fortification that was involved, in 1775, in the first naval engagement of the American Revolutionary War . Buzzards Bay Buzzards Bay is a bay of the Atlantic Ocean adjacent to the U.S. state of Massachusetts . It is approximately 28 miles (45 kilometers) long by 8 miles (12 kilometers) wide. It

207-631: The National Estuary Program , as "an estuary of national significance" that is threatened by pollution, land development, or overuse. It is surrounded by the Elizabeth Islands on the south, by Cape Cod on the east, and the southern coasts of Bristol and Plymouth counties in Massachusetts to the northwest. To the southwest, the bay is connected to Rhode Island Sound . The city of New Bedford, Massachusetts

230-621: The estuarine waters to create a productive aquatic ecosystem. Like many estuaries, however, increasing development and land-use changes by the surrounding communities are accompanied by nutrient runoff leading to eutrophication (an increase in nutrient levels leading to oxygen depletion) in the smaller embayments . Decreases in eelgrass , scallops , and herring have also been noted, but direct cause-and-effect relationships are not clear. Coordinated management efforts in Buzzards Bay have helped to decrease shellfish closures, conserve habitat for sea birds , and preserve open space. Buzzards Bay

253-548: The New Bedford coast to just before Frederick Street. A discontiguous segment protects the top of Clark's Cove in New Bedford, roughly to the Dartmouth border. The barrier consists of an arc of riprap and fill, approximately three kilometres long, surmounted by a service road. At the center of the marine structure is a control tower and a set of hydraulically operated doors that can be closed, when necessary, to shut out

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276-501: The breadth of New Bedford harbor, carrying US Route 6 . Beginning on the western (New Bedford) side of the river, there is a short bridge over the shallow gut dividing the New Bedford bank from Fish Island. The second part of the traverse involves crossing the main river channel between Fish Island and Pope's Island via the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge , a swing bridge that originally opened in 1902. Finally,

299-443: The edges of the continental ice sheet covering much of North America began to fluctuate, leaving moraines to mark the former extent of the receded ice. One such moraine forms Cape Cod, which is most of the eastern shoreline of Buzzards Bay. In addition to the moraines, the melting ice sheet produced extensive outwash plains composed of mixed sediments and ice that bordered the bay to the northwest and west. Melting ice blocks in

322-600: The nearby Plimouth colony . Quite naturally, the English mistook " Cushnea " for a fixed placename or the name of a specific river. The source of the Acushnet River is Long Pond in Lakeville, Massachusetts . The root tributary, Squam Brook, flows out of Long Pond and through the settlement called Freetown before it fills the New Bedford Reservoir in the town of Acushnet . From the reservoir,

345-581: The others took the first naval prisoners of the war, 13 British crew; two were wounded and one died. The bay was the location, in 1936, of one of only five documented fatal shark attacks in the commonwealth's history. In 1987, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution experimented with a new growth structure allowing Blue mussels to grow above the Benthic Turbidity Zone leading to

368-512: The outwash deposits formed distinctive circular features called kettle lakes . Numerous examples of kettle lakes can be found to the northwest of the Cape Cod Canal. Finally, waters released from the melting ice sheet raised sea level by sixty to one-hundred-twenty meters (198–396 feet) and drowned preexisting outwash channels. Toward the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago until about six thousand years ago, Buzzards Bay

391-531: The river continues southward, forming the dividing-line between Acushnet and the city of New Bedford . Then it divides New Bedford, on its western bank, from Fairhaven , on its eastern bank, before spilling into Buzzards Bay, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean . The river is crossed by bridges six times. There are three short bridges in Acushnet, where the river is narrow. As the river leaves Acushnet, it widens to form an estuarine harbor, New Bedford harbor, which

414-513: The river's banks were home to many mills, especially on the New Bedford side of the river. The river's mouth, which forms a small but well-sheltered harbor, has long served as the home port of New Bedford's commercial fishing fleet. It is also the birthplace of New Bedford's whaling industry; the Dartmouth , the first ship whose keel was laid in New Bedford, first set sail on this river. (The ship would go on to fame as one of those involved in

437-554: The road crosses the shallow eastern passage from Pope's Island to Fairhaven along the low-lying Pope's Island Bridge. Beginning in 1958, the New Bedford Harbor Hurricane Barrier was built from a point about 300 feet north of Fort Phoenix, in Fairhaven, to Gifford Street on the New Bedford coast. The 20-foot high barrier continues onto land, where three large doors allow street traffic to pass through during calm seas. The longer segment continues along

460-576: The surge of seawater that typically accompanies a major storm or hurricane . Taken as a whole, the barrier is the largest stone structure on the East Coast of the United States. At the start of early America, it was foundational to the earliest European settlers. It provided them the basic essentials – water, food, travel and more. The success of the earliest communities depended on this river. The early communities developed from homestead to hamlet, to village, town, and city. This process of accretion

483-508: Was based on that initial discovery of the waterway. The Acushnet River served many homesteads that would develop into larger communities along its 8.6-mile course, from its source at Long Pond in Lakeville to its emptying into Buzzard’s Bay. It has directly contributed to the success of New Bedford on its West Bank, Fairhaven on its East Bank, Lakeville, Freetown, and Acushnet. Indirectly it has allowed many more towns to thrive. Historically,

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506-626: Was first named Gosnold's Hope by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold . The modern name was presumably given by colonists who saw a large bird that they called a buzzard near its shores. The bird was actually an osprey . After a downturn caused by DDT , today increasing numbers of osprey breed along the shores of the bay thanks to restoration efforts led by the Buzzards Bay Coalition and longtime Westport residents Gil and Josephine Fernandez. The first naval engagement of

529-543: Was still dry land. During the past six thousand years, sea level has risen an average of one foot per century, and until about four thousand years ago, the landward boundary of Buzzards Bay extended only to about the current thirty-foot bathymetric contour, forming a coastline two-thirds of the way up the current bay, between West Falmouth and Mattapoisett. The bay's current configuration, a well-mixed central bay and fringing shallow drowned-river valleys, with their shallow depth, tidal action, and surface waves, promotes mixing of

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