Rick Rivers, of Coventry, fishes near the Providence Street bridge over the Pawtuxet River in West Warwick.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

WEST WARWICK — For the first time perhaps since the Industrial Revolution, anglers are fishing for trout on the stretch of the Pawtuxet River that flows through this town.

Albert Allard has lived here for all of his 60 years. He remembers when the river ran a different color each day, depending on what the mills were dying. “We’d swim in it anyway,” he said, “and when I got home, my mother would ask if I was in the river. I’d say, ‘No, Ma,’ and she’d say, ‘Then why are you all purple?’ ”

Allard’s son, Jason, has been fishing the Phenix stretch of the river for 35 years. He remembers the stench.

As recently as 1981, The Providence Journal reported on the Pawtuxet’s “flowing filth … unfit for all but the most basic forms of life.”

Yesterday, on the Opening Day of trout-fishing season, the Allard men, and Jason’s children, Autumn and Jason Jr., fished for trout that the state had stocked near the intersection of Routes 117, 33 and 115. The water was clear and the air clean. Red-wing blackbirds were calling as they prepared to feed on mayflies, caddisflies and other aquatic insects that would soon emerge from the healthy riverbed.

Jason Allard had scouted the stretch Friday, and had spotted trout rising to sip insects off the surface.

Yesterday, he and his family fished from a small grass lot across the road from Roch’s Market. Albert Allard remembers when the Friendly Shop was on the site; his mother worked in a mill diagonally across the road.

At dawn, the Allards had the place to themselves, with nesting swans and a small but noisy group of Canada geese on the opposite bank.

The children, 12 and 13 years old, appeared to be enjoying themselves. Their father, an active outdoorsman, spoke softly about the river’s resurrection. “There used to be cars, tires, refrigerators, stoves, whatever you could imagine in here,” he said. “I remember all the dyes that would murk up the river. Now when you walk over a bridge and look down, you can actually see life in the river.”

The north branch of the river now rises at the Scituate Reservoir, and the south branch flows from the Flat River Reservoir, also called Johnson’s Pond, in Coventry. The north and south branches meet at Riverpoint in West Warwick, and the river flows 11.7 miles to Pawtuxet Cove on Narragansett Bay.

Since the late 18th century, factory owners had dammed the river for power and dumped their waste into it, often with the permission of the state. Towns dumped so much waste into the river, that The Providence Journal in 1981 reported “that on some late-summer days, half of the lower river is sewage.”

The river had become so foul and fetid, that “many people had given it up for dead,” said Robert Nero, chairman of the Pawtuxet River Authority. “No one thought the river would come back.”

In 1972, Congress approved the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, and the Pawtuxet River Authority was established. States received more power to stop polluters in 1977 when amendments strengthened the 1972 law that would become known as the Clean Water Act.

The Pawtuxet River Authority’s goal, said Nero, was to make the river clean enough for fishing and swimming.

In 30 years, people along the Pawtuxet, such as the Allards, have witnessed the river revived. The water is clean enough for the state Department of Environmental Management to stock trout in 14 places, Nero said. To survive, trout need almost pristine water with plenty of oxygen and a healthy population of insects, minnows and crayfish.

In the works is a fish ladder that might help herring, shad and sea-run trout to spawn in the Pawtuxet.

“The river is in good shape,” Nero said. “We have fishing up and down the river. People are swimming in it again.

“People are using the river in places they never thought they would use it again.”

“People worked really, really hard to get the river the way it is,” Jason Allard said. “Now it’s up to us to keep it this way.”

tmeade@projo.com