For more than seven decades, a quiet stream in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, has been held back by a concrete barrier. Fresh Brook, once known as “Trout Brook,” was a thriving habitat for native sea-run brook trout, locally called “salters”, until the early 1950s. Anglers from across the country travelled to Cape Cod to fish in its one-and-a-half-mile stretch of cold, spring-fed water. But a series of construction projects, culminating in the installation of a concrete weir in 1953, cut off the trout from their ancestral spawning grounds and turned a lively ecosystem into a stagnant pool.
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