LEWISTON – The papers of a Bates College professor who spent decades studying pollution in the Androscoggin River – pollution that prompted the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 – are newly accessible to researchers.

Chemistry professor Walter A. Lawrance served for three decades as the Androscoggin’s state-appointed “rivermaster,” charged with regulating the pollution that paper mills could produce. His studies of river conditions, as well as documentation of research aimed at limiting the mills’ pollution output, are part of the Walter A. Lawrance Papers, a collection now open to researchers at the college’s Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

The Lawrance papers complement the archives’ extensive holdings relating to Edmund Muskie, a 1936 Bates graduate who served as a Maine governor, U.S. senator and U.S. secretary of state. Muskie grew up in Rumford, an Androscoggin mill town, and his firsthand knowledge of the river’s sorry state inspired him, as senator, to produce the landmark Clean Water Act of 1972.

Lawrance taught at Bates from 1921 until 1965. In 1943, he became a consultant for the state as Maine began legal efforts to curtail pollution from three Androscoggin paper mills. The professor was given the responsibility of developing anti-pollution standards for the river, and thus initiated his annual study of the river’s odor.

In 1947, the Maine Supreme Court appointed him “rivermaster” (later called “administrator”) of the Androscoggin, giving Lawrance the power to restrict mill discharges of waste and their overall production. In this role, Lawrance worked collaboratively with each company to determine ways of controlling the problem.

The Maine Supreme Court discontinued the position of rivermaster in 1978, and Lawrance officially retired from his duties. He died in 1987.