Ask someone who's lived in Kingston for a decade what the town is known for and you'll probably hear Route 3, the Kingston Collection, maybe the commuter rail stop. Nobody says "the river." That's understandable. For roughly three centuries, the Jones River wasn't really a river you thought about. It was dammed at Elm Street, backed up, slowed down, and mostly ignored except by the handful of people who fished it or paddled the calmer stretches near Silver Lake.
That changed in 2019, and the change is still working its way through the town in ways that show up on a Tuesday night at a brewery on Summer Street or a Saturday afternoon at a boat launch off Landing Road. The dam came down. The river started running the way it did before English settlers named it after the Mayflower's captain. And in the years since, a handful of unrelated people, a watershed nonprofit, two guys who used to brew beer in a backyard, a restaurant that's been open since 2003, have each built something around that free-flowing water without any of it being planned as a package. The result is that Kingston now has a real weekend circuit built around its river, and most of the people driving past it on Route 3A haven't clocked that it happened.
What Actually Came Down at Elm Street
The Elm Street Dam removal wrapped up in the fall of 2019, according to the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration, which worked the project alongside the Jones River Watershed Association, the Town of Kingston, MassWildlife, and NOAA. The dam sat at the head of tide, meaning it was the first barrier fish hit coming in from the ocean, and its removal restored connectivity to more than 24 miles of river habitat for alewife, blueback herring, and rainbow smelt. Partners marked the occasion by kayaking through the old dam site that November.
That's not a small technical footnote. A dam at the head of tide is the chokepoint. Removing it doesn't just help fish upstream, it changes what the whole 7.5-mile run from Silver Lake to Kingston Bay is capable of being. The Wapping Road Dam had already come out in 2011. With Elm Street gone too, the Jones River became one of the longer free-flowing stretches on the South Shore, and the Jones River Watershed Association has spent the years since building a volunteer program around proving it. Every spring, from April 1 through May 31, JRWA runs an annual herring count. Volunteers show up at a fish ladder for ten-minute stretches, tally what swims through, and feed the numbers to fishery managers who use the data to track whether the restoration is actually working. It's not glamorous work. It's also the reason anyone can say with real evidence, not just civic optimism, that the run is coming back.
Two Neighbors, a Backyard, and a Beer Named for the River
Around the same stretch of years, two Kingston neighbors named Paul Schiele and Matt Ward were doing something unrelated to any of that: brewing beer for fun, the kind of hobby that starts with a firepit and a few too many "sampling sessions." By December 2020 those sessions had turned into an actual plan, and with help from local marketers Steve Darby and Nia Tieu, the four of them built out Forty Second Brew Co, now pouring at 77 Summer Street in Kingston Center. When the tap room opened, State Representative Kathy LaNatra showed up for the ribbon cutting along with members of the Kingston Business Association, the kind of small-town detail that tells you this wasn't a chain trying to find a foothold. It was neighbors making something local businesses in town could actually stock.
The beer that ties this back to the water is called Jones River Kölsch, brewed specifically for the town and poured at a release event at Jones River Landing itself. This past summer, the brewery took the connection further, running its first annual summer event at Long Point Marina in August, pouring pints for a crowd that showed up by boat as much as by car. If you're wondering whether any of this has actually caught on beyond the die-hards, checking Untappd from mid-August turns up people logging pints of Forty Second's Piping Plover at spots ranging from the brewery itself to Green Harbor Beach to Long Point Marine, which is a decent proxy for a beer that's traveled well past its own taproom.
A Restaurant in a Train Depot, and the Water Nearby
None of this required new construction or a redevelopment plan. Solstice, the restaurant most people already think of when they picture eating out in Kingston Center, has occupied a renovated 19th-century train station since 2003, run by husband and wife John and Hollie Cataldi. It predates the dam removal by sixteen years. What's changed isn't the restaurant. It's what surrounds it. A dinner at Solstice used to be an isolated stop in Kingston Center. Now it sits inside a short walk of a brewery pouring a beer named for the river, and a short drive from a boat launch where you can actually get on that river.
That launch is Mulliken's Landing, a state and town owned access point off Landing Road at the intersection with River Road, dedicated in 2002 in honor of longtime Kingston resident Robert A. Mulliken. It's built for canoes, kayaks, and car-top boats, with a short boardwalk trail leading to a seasonal ramp and float. Paddle downstream and Kingston Bay is about 1.4 miles away. Paddle upstream and you'll hit Elm Street, the site of the old dam, in roughly the same distance. The best window to go is around high tide, when the water has enough depth to make the trip easy rather than a slog through mud flats. A little further downstream on Landing Road sits the Kingston Town Pier, also known as Ah-De-Nah, a Wampanoag name meaning "a good place to stay," which handles the larger boats that can't launch from Mulliken's.
How Kingston Residents Are Actually Spending These Weekends
Put the pieces next to each other and a pattern shows up that wasn't there ten years ago:
- Launch a kayak from Mulliken's Landing around high tide and paddle toward Kingston Bay or up toward Elm Street, where the old dam site now runs clear.
- Volunteer for a ten-minute herring count shift with the Jones River Watershed Association any week between April 1 and May 31, no experience required.
- Stop at Forty Second Brew Co on Summer Street for a Jones River Kölsch, or catch one of their events at Long Point Marina if you're already out on the water.
- Finish the day at Solstice, still serving out of the old train depot in Kingston Center, more than two decades after it opened.
None of these four things required the others to exist. That's what makes the pattern worth noticing instead of just another list of things to do. A watershed nonprofit removed an ecological chokepoint because it was the right thing to do for fish, not foot traffic. Two neighbors brewed beer because they liked doing it. A restaurant kept doing what it's always done. The river being open again is the thread connecting all of it, even though nobody set out to connect anything.
This Fall's Version of That Pattern
The town's fall calendar shows the same layering. Olde Home Day drew families to Opachinski Field this past weekend, a long-running community tradition that has nothing to do with the river directly but everything to do with the same instinct: Kingston residents showing up for things that happen in their own town rather than driving to Plymouth or Duxbury for the evening. This coming Saturday, the second annual Cranberry Festival takes over Jones River Community Chapel, timed to the same harvest season that's been part of this stretch of Massachusetts for generations. Neither event is new because of the dam removal. Both are evidence of the same thing the river corridor proves: Kingston's actual social calendar is denser than its reputation as a pass-through town would suggest.
If you live here, you already know parts of this. Maybe you've paddled from Mulliken's or had a pint at Forty Second without ever connecting it to a dam that came out before some of the town's newer residents moved in. That's the point worth sitting with. The infrastructure for a real weekend in Kingston has been assembling itself for years, one unrelated decision at a time, and it only looks obvious once you see all the pieces on the same map.
If you're curious how any of this shows up in the neighborhoods around that river, or you just want to talk about what's happening in Kingston beyond the festival calendar, Christopher Sheridan is always glad to talk shop about the town he grew up watching change. Let's Connect.
