A river that once lost two million herring came back to life — here’s how the impossible comeback began. After decades of collapse, the waterway had become a ghost, its fish populations vanishing until just a handful remained.
The decline of river herring populations in Massachusetts was not fully understood for many years, but the scale of the loss became clear through historical records and modern observation. One stream in Plymouth, now known as Town Brook, once hosted a spring run of roughly two million fish. Over three centuries, that number fell so low that state officials declared similar rivers biologically dead…