Christmas Eve, Nineteen Thirty-Five: The Day the Mills Closed

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company filed for bankruptcy on Christmas Eve, nineteen thirty-five. After more than a century as the dominant institution in Manchester, it was gone in a press release. The causes had been accumulating for years.

Southern textile mills had been drawing business away since the nineteen twenties, offering lower wages and no union. Fashions had changed. The gingham and flannel and ticking that Amoskeag excelled at had fallen out of broad demand.

Management had been slow to modernize. The nineteen twenty-two strike had depleted reserves and accelerated the departure of experienced workers. The Great Depression removed whatever slack remained.

What happened next was remarkable. City leaders feared that the millyard, nearly six million square feet of brick and machinery along the Merrimack, would be purchased by outside investors who would strip the machinery and leave an empty shell. To prevent this, Manchester businessmen pooled resources with extraordinary speed.

They formed a new entity called Amoskeag Industries, raised five million dollars in ten days, and purchased the entire millyard out of bankruptcy court. Within eighteen months, forty new and smaller manufacturers had moved into the buildings. The rescue was improvised, local, and it worked.

Then the flood came. Three months after the bankruptcy filing, the Merrimack rose to its highest recorded level. Four of the city's seven bridges were swept away.

The dam was saved only by half a million sandbags. The flood added two and a half million dollars in damage to an institution that was already on its knees. But the buildings survived.

They are still here.