The Factory State

A century ago, there were 4,000 factories operating in Connecticut (that's more than twice the number of full time farms operating on the state now, for comparison). Essentially all the factories dumped their waste into a tributary of the Sound or directly into the Sound itself. Remnants of these wastes are hidden everywhere, including, as Vincent Breslin's students at SCSU found out, at the bottom of the Branford River. And as this article mentions in passing, the Branford is by no means the worst place.