Quequechan Festival in FR

“Crowds gather for Quequechan River Festival” details the events yesteday in Fall River as the city celebrated the second Quequechan River Festival at Britland Park.

The event was held as part of a larger effort to bring attention to the “hidden” river that traverses through the city and from which the city gets its name.

Green Futures, a nonprofit advocacy group, sponsored the event in the hopes of raising awareness for the waterway and to restore the area that “has been covered by mill buildings and then diverted into a culvert in the 1960s to make way for Interstate 195.”

Stewart Horvitz, festival co-chairman, said Green Futures is hoping to create a greenbelt along the upper Quequechan River and bring the river back to its earlier state with waterfalls.

“We’d like the Quequechan to run from the South Watuppa Pond to the Taunton River without being underground, tunneled and redirected,” he said.

Lima said Green Futures hopes to extend green areas around the river along its full extent.

Also planned is a bike/walk path that would run from the South Watuppa Pond to the Taunton River, and potentially link up to the Cape Cod path and East Bay bike path in Rhode Island.

The festival was part of a larger scope of educational activities conducted by Green Futures and the Quequechan River Initiative. The year-long series of activities has as its goal the realization of a greenbelt along the upper Quequechan River and the “daylighting” of the river’s falls. These are the same goals of the city’s Urban River Visions Initiative.

You can read more about the Quequechan River in the August 2006 issue of The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies in an brilliant piece by Fall River native Michael Brimbau, titled “Growing Up Along the Quequechan.”