If you have eaten lunch on the deck at Camden Deli, you have looked out at the reflecting pool the Montgomery Dam creates above the falls, watched the water pour over the spillway behind Main Street, and probably never thought of it as temporary. It has been there long enough that most people in town assume it always will be. It will not. The dam is scheduled to come out, the money to do it is already secured, and in August the town's design team put an actual plan in front of residents for the first time.
This is not a fresh argument. It is the end of one that has been running since at least 2019, and the part most people missed is that it already got resolved.
The Vote Already Happened
On June 10, 2025, Camden voters decided the question at the ballot box, approving removal of the Montgomery Dam and spillway at the head of Camden Harbor by a margin of 1,391 to 995. The vote came with one condition attached: the project's cost could not fall on property owners through local taxation. That single line is why the story sat quiet for most of last year. The town needed outside money before it could move, and until the money showed up, there was nothing new to report.
Where the Money Came From
The money showed up in December 2025, when Camden was awarded $5,933,000 from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's National Coastal Resilience Fund. The grant was part of a $78 million national package spread across 68 projects, and Camden's application was built around a specific argument: the dam raises flood risk on Main Street during heavy rain, and it blocks fish like alewives and blueback herring from reaching the river's upper watershed. The Select Board formally accepted the grant in April 2026, which is what turned a voter-approved idea into a funded one. The period of performance runs from mid-2026 to late 2028, and none of it draws on Camden's tax base.
What the 90 Percent Design Actually Shows
The design work stayed mostly out of public view until August 11, 2026, when the Camden Public Library hosted what was officially called the Harbor Park Revitalization and Dam Removal Public Engagement meeting. The turnout filled the downstairs lobby and the Jean Picker Room. Eamonn Hutton, a principal at Tandem Landscape Architects, walked residents through what his team is calling the 90 percent complete design, covering the stretch of shoreline from Main Street down to the property line of the privately owned American Boathouse.
The plan replaces roughly 500 linear feet of the existing seawall with a stepped, hybrid living shoreline rather than one continuous wall. Instead of a hard edge that either holds or breaks during a storm, the new design uses boulders and reclaimed granite blocks pulled from the site itself, arranged as a series of steps that let the water rise and recede without pushing storm damage onto neighboring property. A new path from Main Street down to the water will be ADA accessible, removing the steep steps currently there. Design elements also include a seating area facing the harbor, meant for watching boat shows and fireworks the way people already do, and educational tidal pools intended for outdoor classroom use.
As Natalie Travia, Camden Public Library Trustee and Board President, put it to the crowd that night:
"We know you are here because you care deeply about the Harbor Park, the Megunticook River and the waterfall at the head of the harbor."
Hutton framed the redesign around three pressures working at once: opening the river to fish for the first time in a century, restoring a park that Olmsted-era designers never intended to fight the tide, and preparing the shoreline for storm surges the town expects to keep intensifying over the next 75 years.
What the Library Trustees Won't Let Change
Harbor Park was designed by the Olmsted Brothers and given to the town by Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1932, part of the same building boom that produced the library itself and the adjoining amphitheater designed by Fletcher Steele. Because of how the original deed was written, the Camden Public Library Trustees oversee the park, and the town vote specifically charged them with keeping the final design faithful to that Olmsted vision and to the park's listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
That mandate is doing real work here. It is why the falls themselves are not disappearing. Below the dam sits a natural rock ledge, and once the impoundment behind the dam is gone, the river will still drop over that ledge into the harbor. What changes is the reflecting pool the dam currently holds back and the concrete structure itself, not the fact of a waterfall at the head of Main Street.
This distinction is exactly what a group called Save the Dam Falls pushed back on when it organized in 2021. Its members included some of the longest-running names on Main Street: Tom Rothwell of Camden Deli, Dan Gabriele of Marriners, Arthur Kirkland of The Leather Bench, and Meg Quijano of the Smiling Cow. Rothwell's objection at the time still captures the tension well:
"What is being proposed is a dramatic, broad ranging change to a landscape that has been largely untouched for 200 years."
Four years and a town vote later, the design that emerged tries to answer that concern directly, keeping the waterfall, reusing the site's own stone, and putting the Library Trustees in charge of making sure the result still reads as Camden rather than as a generic engineered shoreline.
The Downtown Business Question
Several Main Street businesses, including restaurants with decks positioned to take in the dam's reflecting pool, will see that view change once construction starts. The project team has been explicit that the goal is to protect the summer economy while the work happens. Current plans call for construction to begin after Labor Day 2027, with the finished shoreline and river outlet targeted for completion by the 2028 summer season. Most of the physical work is expected to fall outside the Memorial Day to Labor Day window, so two full tourist seasons pass before ground actually breaks, and the harder construction phases are aimed at the shoulder seasons rather than July and August.
The River Has More Than One Conversation Going
Harbor Park is not the only place on the Megunticook where Camden is rethinking its relationship to the water this year. A short distance upstream, the town is weighing whether to convert the vehicular bridge on Mt. Battie Street, where it crosses the river near Tannery Park, into a pedestrian-only footbridge. The Maine Department of Transportation has told the town it will fund a full bridge replacement and has already built $500,000 in preliminary engineering money into its 2026 to 2028 work plan, but it is waiting on Camden to decide what kind of bridge it wants before design work starts. The Select Board took up the question this September.
Neither project depends on the other, but together they say something about where Camden's attention is right now. This is a town spending real time deciding how much of its infrastructure should bend to the river rather than hold it back, from the highly visible falls behind Main Street to a low, easy-to-miss bridge crossing a few blocks inland.
What This Means If You Walk Past It Every Day
For the next year, not much changes on the ground. The design still has details to finalize, including the horticulture plantings, pathway materials, and historic interpretation panels that Hutton's team is still refining based on public feedback from the August meeting. Construction is not expected before the fall of 2027. But the shape of what comes next is no longer a hypothetical the way it was in 2019 or even in 2021. It is a funded, voter-approved, 90 percent designed project with a timeline, and the falls behind Camden Deli will look different by the time the 2028 boating season opens.
If you want to see the renderings yourself, both the 90 percent design and the earlier comparison images sit on the town's Megunticook River Watershed Project resource page, maintained at camdenmaine.gov, alongside the meeting summaries the Select Board has been publishing all year.
Camden keeps changing in ways that respect what made it worth living in to begin with, and the Harbor Park project is a clear example of that pattern playing out in real time. If you are curious what a shifting downtown means for property values along the water or anywhere else in town, the Lauren Jones Team knows this stretch of coast as well as anyone working it, and we are always glad to talk through what a project like this means for your own piece of Camden.
