Amoskeag, The Largest Mill on Earth

Stand on the west bank of the Merrimack River in Manchester and look at the brick buildings stretching along the bank for nearly a mile. What you are looking at is the ghost of the largest textile manufacturing complex the world had ever seen, and for a period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was still running at full speed. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was chartered in eighteen thirty-one, taking its name from the Abenaki word for the falls on the Merrimack, Amoskeag means something close to "the place of the great fishing."

The company did not build a mill so much as build a city around it. By the eighteen eighties, Amoskeag had laid out the streets of Manchester, built the boardinghouses where its workers slept, constructed the churches where they prayed, and maintained a fire department. The mill owned the waterway and the land and, in many ways, the people.

At its absolute peak, Amoskeag employed seventeen thousand workers running thirty mills and producing fifty miles of cloth every single hour. Think about that for a moment: fifty miles of fabric per hour, pouring out of one industrial complex in one mid-sized New Hampshire city. Mill Number Eleven alone was nine hundred feet long and held four thousand looms.

The complex made rifle muskets for the Union Army during the Civil War, then returned to cloth. It was, by any measure, the largest textile operation in the world. Immigrant workers, French Canadian, Greek, Polish, Irish, Swedish, poured into Manchester and filled the boarding houses.

Many stayed for a generation or more, building tight ethnic neighborhoods. Then, in the nineteen twenties, southern competition, labor disputes, and management miscalculation began to crack the enterprise. Amoskeag declared bankruptcy in nineteen thirty-five.

Seventeen thousand jobs evaporated. Manchester has been rebuilding that loss ever since. The mills still stand, converted now to apartments, offices, and museums, the brick warm in the afternoon light above the Merrimack.