The sight of a salt marsh suffused in a briny late summer glow is as beautiful and emblematic as anything you’ll find on the Seacoast.

It’s fitting, then, that this image pops up throughout the Oyster River Festival taking place in Durham this weekend.
Several local organizations have coordinated three days worth of history and art to celebrate the natural beauty and importance of the Oyster River, a tributary to Great Bay.

“We’re hoping to raise awareness of the watershed, the Oyster River, the Mill Pond Center for the Arts, and the Gundalow,” says Barbara Maurer, volunteer for the Oyster River Watershed Association and education director for The Gundalow Company, two of the participating organizations.

The festival, which runs Aug. 25-27, will include a concert with The Mammals, tours and lectures aboard the Capt. Edward Adams at the Durham Town Landing, a river walk with the Oyster River Watershed Association, children’s art and story activities and a fine art exhibit at the Mill Pond Center for the Arts, and a buffet dinner at Three Chimneys Inn, one of the oldest buildings in the state and part of the original settlement at Oyster River Falls.

And the salt marsh?

Long a reminder of the region’s agricultural heritage, today salt marshes are a vital marker of our healthy ecosystem. For one artist exhibiting at the “Art of the Oyster River” show, they’re personal.

“When I moved here 20 years ago, I hadn’t painted in a while,” recalls fine art painter Stan Moeller. “When I first saw a salt marsh, it made me want to paint again full time. That’s when I started picking up a brush again after 10 years.”

Moeller is a modernist impressionist painter from York, Maine, with a studio in nearby Rollinsford. Although he also paints interiors and streetscapes, like a long tradition of coastal artists of the Northeast, he continues to be stirred by the variants of color, shape and value, the quality of the light, in the marshes. “When I walk out there, I just want to paint them,” he says. His painting in the show, of egrets taking flight, represents a scene that could have taken place hundreds or thousands of years ago.

About 30 different artists working in a variety of media will participate, including Arthur DiMambro, Tom Glover, Don Lent, Tim Gaudreau, Jane Kaufman and Brett Gamache. The exhibit opens on Friday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

“The theme is generally the Oyster River watershed environment,” says Amanda Merrill, visual arts coordinator at the Mill Pond Center, which offers classes in visual arts as well as other disciplines. “We will have some traditional types of oil landscapes. We’ll also have some scenes of the built environment. Grace Kim, a recent MFA graduate, has focused on the University of New Hampshire campus, for example.”

In fact, the river supplies the campus with its primary source of drinking water. A one-mile stretch of its eight-mile course, from Swain’s Lake in Barrington to the Great Bay estuary, runs through the school’s College Woods. The river’s 2,300-acre watershed includes the towns of Durham, Lee, Madbury, Barrington and Nottingham.

Walk along its banks and its tributaries, and you’ll find trout and salamanders, signs of beavers, otters and muskrats, fishermen and duck hunters. The river crosses Route 4 twice and Route 125 once, near the Lee Traffic circle. Otherwise, it’s fairly secluded.

“Much of the Oyster River and its tributaries are really flowing through what we think of as pristine land, and that’s good,” says Dick Weyrick, 40-year forestry professor at UNH and now a volunteer for the Oyster River Watershed Association in his retirement. This weekend, he’ll lead a two-hour river walk that departs the Mill Pond Center at 9 a.m.

A group of volunteers formed the Oyster River Watershed Association in 1999 to monitor the health and preservation of natural resources in the watershed. They take a monthly walk, open to the public, along the river and its tributaries, identifying plant and animal species as they go, taking water quality samples for the state at 12 freshwater sites and keeping records of everything from otter sightings to non-native species.

“The quality of the river is incredibly good. We’re really lucky. It’s still incredibly pristine compared to what some other groups have to deal with. There’s no heavy industry, for example. So we have a baseline now, and it’s a matter of paying attention to it over the years, raising people’s awareness of how they affect water,” says Barbara Maurer.

The walk Weyrick leads on Saturday will explore the backwaters along the Mill Pond.

“This will be along a semblance of a path that fisher people and others have used in the past,” Weyrick says. “This particular one will be hosted by Dennis Meadows, who lives at the top of the pond. He’ll be showing us some of the features of his land, some of the things that happened as a result of the spring storms, like sand and gravel deposited where they haven’t been before.”

When European settlers first arrived on the inland shores of Great Bay in the early 1600s, they followed the Oyster River to settle inland. The river was abundant with eels, oysters and smelt, and Native Americans lived in the area. The Europeans built fortified garrisons along the waterways, and the region known as Piscataqua and the river called Shankhassick developed quickly. By 1649, Valentine Hill, owner of what’s now the Three Chimneys Inn—which will offer a buffet dinner on Thursday night—built a sawmill and the dam that created the Mill Pond. By 1687, an entrepreneur had established the tavern that is today the Mill Pond Center for the Arts. 

Both establishments are perched at the mouth of the river. Through the 18th century, the region’s waterways were the main thoroughfare. Much of the travel and transport was accomplished via gundalow, a cargo boat designed to move nimbly throughout the Great Bay region, with a shallow draft and an adjustable mast. Some industrial towns like Durham, Exeter and Rollinsford sent manufactured goods like textiles, linseed oil and snuff to waiting ships in Portsmouth Harbor, but the boats that sailed from the more rural Durham were loaded with lumber, cordwood, bricks made from the high quality local blue clay and salt marsh hay.

The last gundalow was built was by Capt. Edward Adams at Adams Point in Durham during the 1920s, even then a remembrance of days long gone by. The replica gundalow, an educational vessel built in the 1980s that docks at traditional ports of call around Great Bay throughout the summer, is named in Adams’ honor. The boat will be docked at Durham Town Landing, open to the public daily from noon to 4 p.m. On Thursday night, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Judith Spang of the Oyster River Study Group will present a free program, called “Restoration of the Oyster River,” aboard the boat.

A cross section of the region’s history, from European settlement to today, is visible at the Mill Pond Center for the Arts. The buildings are set beside the pond that Valentine Hill first dammed in 1649, surrounded by fields and pine forests of the type once cultivated for trade. The structures used for administration and classes include the 1687 tavern, moved back from Route 108 sometime before 1916, and a barn, built between 1915 and 1920, that now houses a dance studio on the main floor and an intimate 90-seat theater in the loft.

The center was founded in 1981 when Lewis and Judith Roberts purchased the property. After two more owners came and left, the 17-acre farm finally settled into the hands of community volunteers with the help of private donations and the Greater Piscataqua Community Foundation. It will be the site of a contra dance on Sunday afternoon and concert with The Mammals on Saturday night. The Mammals, who combine rock with traditional Appalachian music as they travel across the country to perform, claim two local boys, Chris and Mike Merenda, as their own.

“Durham’s pretty proud of that. It brings a real different feel to the concert,” says Katie Muth, executive director of the Mill Pond Center for the Arts.

Families are invited to pack some food and drinks and spread out on the beautiful meadow while they enjoy the music. Asked what she wants people to experience at the first-ever festival, Muth says she’d like people to gain a sense of community and of place.

“This is our home. We need to take care of it. These are the things happening around it,” she says. “And this is just some end-of-the-summer fun.”

Oyster River Festival
Aug. 25-27, Durham
rain or shine
www.oysterriverfestival.com
proceeds will benefit Oyster River Watershed Association

Thursday
• noon-4pm: Gundalow arrives at the Durham Town Landing, open to the public through Sunday
• 5:30-7:30pm: presentation on “Restoring the Oyster River” by Judith Spang, at the Gundalow, Town Landing (refreshments will be served)
• 6-9pm: Festival Buffet featuring Italian food at Three Chimneys Inn, $25 per person, reservations suggested at 603-868-7800

Friday
• 9:30am-noon: Children & The Gundalow—tours, stories and tidepools, reserve a space by calling
603-433-9505
• 5-7pm: “Art of the Oyster River” opening reception, Mill Pond Center
• 7-9pm: Oyster River Watershed Meeting, Mill Pond Center

Saturday
• all day: Oyster River history and ecology exhibits, plus children’s activity: Explore the River!, Mill Pond Center
• 9am: Oyster River Walk, starts at Mill Pond Center
• 10am-8pm: “Art of the Oyster River” festival art show continues, Mill Pond Center
• 1-3pm: Children’s Environmental Art Activity with Ruth Caron, $2 per child, Mill Pond Center
• 8pm: The Mammals in concert on the lawn at Mill Pond Center, $15, doors open at 6pm. Food available to purchase. In case of rain, concert will be held at Oyster River High School

Sunday
• noon-6pm: “Art of the Oyster River” festival art show continues, Mill Pond Center
• 4-6pm: Oyster River Contra Dance with Peter Yarensky, $5 adults and $3 for children, with food available for purchase, Mill Pond Center

locations
Mill Pond Center for the Arts,
50 Newmarket Road, 603-868-8999, www.millpondcenter.org
Durham Town Landing, Old Landing Road (off Route 108). For more information, call the Gundalow company at 603-433-9505 or visit
www.gundalow.org
Three Chimneys Inn, 17 Newmarket Road, 603-868-7800,
www.threechimneysinn.com