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Quashnet River

estuary in Massachusetts, United States

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 3, 2024
Entity authorityQ7269427
Source-derived summary

The Quashnet River, also known as Quoshnet River or Moonakis River, is a 5.1-mile-long (8.2 km) estuary in Falmouth, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. Its area is about 1-square-mile (2.6 km2).

The river is connected by ditch to John's Pond in Mashpee, just north of today's Route 28. It is fed by groundwater and flows south, gaining water as it goes, into Waquoit Bay which then flows into Nantucket Sound. During colonial times it was known for its abundant brook trout but was dammed in the mid-19th century for water power. After the mills burned and the dam was breached, the valley was converted to cranberry cultivation in the early 20th century. Cranberry production stopped in the 1950s, and the cranberry bogs were abandoned. The land was purchased by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts beginning in the late 1950s, and Trout Unlimited and other organizations began to restore the river to trout-quality in the 1970s.

Today the river is an important migratory fish run for alewife and salter brook trout, home to herring and eels, and is Waquoit Bay's largest source of fresh water. Additional portions of its watershed were purchased through the years by various entities.

Editorial summary

“Quashnet River” enters the record as estuary in Massachusetts, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Quashnet, River and estuary can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 195-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Quashnet, River and estuary.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Quashnet River” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Quashnet, River and estuary provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7269427. The Library of Congress control number is sh92001363. Authority coordinates are 41.573, -70.518. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Quashnet River” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.