The Largest Mill in the World: Amoskeag at Its Peak

At the peak of its production, in the years around nineteen ten, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company ran thirty buildings along both banks of the Merrimack, employed more than seventeen thousand workers, and operated approximately six hundred sixty thousand spindles and twenty four thousand looms. The workforce turned out five million yards of cloth every week. Mill Number Eleven, the largest single structure, stretched nine hundred feet along the river and contained four thousand looms under one roof.

This was, by most reckonings, the largest cotton textile complex in the world. The company had been organized in eighteen thirty-one, consolidating earlier ventures that stretched back to eighteen ten. But the true build-out happened over the following five decades, as one brick mill building after another rose along the Merrimack.

The architecture was deliberate. The buildings are long, repetitive, and uniform, four and five stories of red brick with rows of large windows to admit light onto the loom floors. The effect, from the river, is of a fortified city of industry.

The Amoskeag was not only a manufacturer. It owned the land under most of Manchester, the water rights to the Merrimack, the housing where its workers lived, and the stores where many of them shopped. The company platted the streets, approved the churches, and shaped the municipal government.

A visitor in eighteen eighty could walk from the millyard to the boarding houses to the city hall and feel, at every step, the presence of a single institution. It made gingham, flannel, denim, and ticking. It made locomotive engines for a decade and steam fire engines for two decades after that.

And for a century, it made Manchester what Manchester was.