The Manchester of America: Samuel Blodget's Prophecy

There is a particular kind of civic boosterism that turns out, against all odds, to be correct. Samuel Blodget was a merchant and builder who spent fourteen years, from seventeen ninety-four to eighteen oh seven, digging a canal around the falls so that boats could pass the Merrimack without portaging. It nearly bankrupted him.

But Blodget had a vision that was larger than the canal: he believed that the falls, harnessed properly, could drive the largest textile complex in the Western world. Before he died in eighteen oh seven, Blodget told anyone who would listen that this settlement, then called Derryfield, would become the Manchester of America. He was making a specific reference.

Manchester, England, was the engine room of the industrial revolution, the city where cotton went in as fiber and came out as cloth by the mile. Blodget wanted that here. On June thirteenth, eighteen ten, Derryfield formally changed its name to Manchester.

It is one of the more audacious acts of civic naming in American history. The city did not yet have a significant mill. It had a canal, a handful of farms, and a name borrowed from a prophecy.

The Boston Associates, a group of investors who had already built the mill city of Lowell in Massachusetts, arrived in the eighteen thirties with capital and engineers. By eighteen thirty-eight they owned thousands of acres along both banks, eventually totaling about fifteen thousand acres, and had platted a street grid with Elm Street as the spine. They were building a city from scratch, and they knew exactly what kind.

Within a generation, Blodget's boast had come true in ways even he might not have imagined.