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Agricultural Period (1676 - c. 1780)
The Europeans arrived The earliest Europeans settled in the watershed in the mid-1600s. They were mostly Quakers who emigrated from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Plymouth and Taunton, Massachusetts. No exact population counts of these first settlers are available, and many of the original houses were destroyed during King Philip's War, the Anglo-Native American conflict that ended in 1676. By 1690, 11 to 13 families owned land in the area of present-day New Bedford (Fig. 2), and Joseph Russell owned a parcel of land in what was to become the center of New Bedford's waterfront district. The Russell family played an important role in the development of New Bedford.
Land was cleared These early settlers were primarily subsistence farmers. They cleared the land, planted crops, and kept livestock. They probably also fished. The effect of these early settlers on the landscape and harbor was probably minimal because the population was low. Recent studies on the effect of land-clearing in watersheds of some Chesapeake Bay tributaries found that greater than 20 percent of the watershed must be cleared before erosion increased sedimentation rates in the estuary. Using the number of families present in the Acushnet River watershed by 1771 and the size of the typical New England colonial farm, we estimated that about four percent of the watershed had been cleared by that time. In the later whaling and textile periods, however, more land had been cleared for commercial, industrial, and residential use, and the effects of land-clearing (change in stability and filtering capacity of soil, increased erosion, increased input of sediment and nutrients into the estuary) undoubtably occurred then.