Millers River (Middlesex)

Millers River
Millers River under I-93 highway
Location	Cambridge, Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts
Coordinates	42°22′14.0″N 71°03′56.3″W / 42.370556°N 71.065639°W / 42.370556; -71.065639Coordinates: 42°22′14.0″N 71°03′56.3″W / 42.370556°N 71.065639°W / 42.370556; -71.065639
Status	public walkway
Public transit access	Community College (MBTA station)

Millers River (frequently written as Miller's River) was a river in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. It has since mostly been obscured by landfill and "made land" (land created by filling of waterways). The small remaining estuary is a remnant of wetlands and open water that once divided Cambridge from Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Millers River flowed into the Charles River, providing water transport to commercial and industrial sites along its shores beginning in the early Colonial period. It was previously called Willis Creek and is labeled as such on the 1777 Pelham Map, among others. In the late 19th century, Millers River was used as a dumping place for wastes from abattoirs and slaughterhouses. The stench and health problems related to this use resulted in some of the first public health based anti-pollution environmental laws in Massachusetts and provided precedent for early environmental protection laws throughout the United States. As a result of these issues Chapter 91 of the Massachusetts General Laws was established in 1866 to regulate uses of tidal waterways and is a powerful tool to protect the public welfare in relationship to filled and flowing tidelands today. The inaccessible and degraded industrial landscape around Millers River and along the lower Charles River basin became known during the late 19th century and 20th century as "the Lost Half-Mile".

There is a small surviving section of Millers River along, and under, the North section of the I-93 Highway Charles River Crossing development. This several hundred yard-long section of river became the source of many contentious environmental issues during planning for the Big Dig highway project. The Charles River Watershed Association and The Conservation Law Foundation led efforts to protect Millers River and open it for public access. Permit requirements prevented the remaining section of the river from being filled, and Chapter 91 permits mandated pedestrian access to the previously inaccessible section of the Northern bank of the Charles River.

A pedestrian walkway with playfully designed light poles, interpretive historical panels, and bordered by re-introduced native wetland vegetation, allows access along the remaining section of Millers River between the Charles River and Rutherford Avenue in Charlestown, Massachusetts. A linear public art project, Millers River Littoral Way, presents a series of artworks, graphics, lighting, stainless steel bench sculptures, etchings of historic pre-landfill harbor depths and a memorial to former potato sheds, that provide waypoints for pedestrians traversing the grid of structural piers that support Interstate Highway 93 above. The public art concept plan, and artwork along the access walkway and Littoral Way, were created by artist Ross Miller.