Mills led way to Nashua's future

Sunday, May 18, 2003

By DEAN SHALHOUP, Telegraph Staff

Nashua's Changing Neighborhoods

Although still in his 30s, wealthy Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell was having a hard time shaking a mysterious illness that had been plaguing him. An e"tended trip overseas, he mused, might just be the cure.

A Harvard-educated mathematics whiz, Lowell hit upon the idea of touring British and Scottish factories to learn about their world-renowned industrial technology.

What he discovered, and soon brought back home with him, was knowledge that would not only revolutionize industry in New England, but mean drastic change in the daily lives of its people, including thousands who lived in what is today Nashua.

In Scotland, Lowell met Robert Owen, the famous utopian socialist and industrialist whose factories and mills flourished ñ something that surprised many because of Owen's pro-worker, anti-sweatshop, socially progressive philosophy.

While the factories, including Owen's, jealously guarded their machinery and technology from one another, they welcomed Lowell with open arms, not considering an American one of their rivals. Endowed with a superb memory, Lowell remembered every piece of every machine he saw, and in 1812 he returned to Boston with the pirated details of British technology engraved in his memory.

A dozen miles to the north, a young, energetic lawyer and Harvard classmate of Lowell's, Daniel Abbot, got wind of his old friend's new project. Able to see the Nashua River from his stately, Federal-style home atop a hill in Nashua Village, he pondered the possibilities.

Could the success that Lowell's Boston Manufacturing Co. enjoyed happen along the Nashua River?

"Nashua was blessed with a very valuable natural resource, Mine Falls," said Alan Manoian, the city's assistant economic development director. "The 32-foot drop there was an amazing power source."

That fact didn't get by Abbot. He also knew that downstream, the Nashua River converged with the Merrimack River, which was navigable all the way from Concord to its confluence with the Atlantic Ocean in Newburyport, Mass. It was nature's superhighway, just waiting for traffic.

Like Lowell, Abbot began assembling a team of investors, among them Moses Tyler, Abbot's law partner Benjamin French, the three Greeley brothers, Ezekiel, Alfred and Joseph, and Boston lawyer Daniel Webster.

Nashua Manufacturing Co. was chartered on June 18, 1823. The first order of business was to build a dam at Mine Falls to power the machine shop, which in turn would build all the machinery needed by the new mills.

A year later, Abbot built locks to control the rise and fall of the two rivers for the big boats, near where Thoreau's Landing condominium complex" is today. A roadway was cut to access the area at Lock Street.

Noted Boston architect Asher Benjamin, first agent for the company, laid out the streets of the new planned neighborhood, following the model of Owen's company town in New Lanark, Scotland. These streets are now Factory, High, Myrtle and West Pearl streets, along with the northern ends of Walnut, Chestnut, Vine, Ash, Palm and Pine streets and the Walnut Street Oval, where several of those streets once continued into to the mills.

Not only work, but life, was revolutionized. People began to live according to the factory's schedule, answering the loud bells that resounded in the neighborhood.

The company's plan also called for the building of the Olive Street Congregational Church in 1825. It was located at the top of Temple Street, originally called Church Square, where Indian Head Plaza is today. The next year, a schoolhouse called "Old Brick" was erected on West Pearl Street.

The mills grew, as did the workforce and the city's population. The social utopian concept seemed to be going very well, pleasing Abbot, his fellow investors and workers alike.

At the start of the 20th century, however, undercurrents of employee dissatisfaction began rising as the workers watched thousands of their fellow millers in Lawrence, Mass., go on strike, a violent work stoppage in 1912 that came to be known as the infamous Bread and Roses Strike.

Workers in the Lowell mills struck shortly after. Again, Nashua watched. Working conditions here had deteriorated. The owners were keeping wages as low as possible while increasing the workload. Discontent soared.

Things came to a head on the morning of Monday, Oct. 4, 1915, when a group of workers, mostly of Polish descent, refused to start work. It touched off a mill-wide strike. People were getting hurt, including policemen, when Mayor James Crowley called out the National Guard to confront the strikers.

Hudson resident Marie Estey, 94, lived with her large family in the nearby Labine Block, only yards from the mills' front entrance at Pine and Ledge streets. She remembers a particularly violent day during the strike.

"I was only 5 or 6, but I remember someone, probably an older brother or sister, grabbed me and rushed me upstairs because there was shooting going on," Estey said. "There were all these women who didn't want the train to go in there (to the mill) and they were sitting and lying on the tracks. Some of them were being beaten."

Estey said she remembers the turmoil and panic that day.

"Everyone was running around," she said. "It was pretty scary, with that many children; most of them were running alone."

Abbot's vision of a forever-happy workforce pleasantly going about their jobs and living in the nearby utopian community was shattered. A month after the violent strike, which claimed one life, the mill complexes opened on a limited basis, but it wasn't until April 1916 that all the strikers were rehired and the mills were again running at full capacity.

The mills, and their people from top to bottom, toughed out the Depression and then flourished in the World War II years, earning commendations from Washington for their superb production in the defense effort.

But it would be the aging mills' last hurrah. Nashua Manufacturing sold its operations to Textron after the war and just three years later, in September 1948, Nashua was hit with its very own version of "Black Monday" when Textron announced it was closing the city's mills.

There was still some life in the old buildings, though, and about a year later, several business and civic leaders, led by a young alderman named Hugh Gregg, began wooing out-of-state firms to set up shop in the mills. Their new venture was called Nashua New Hampshire Foundation.

Today, hundreds of people eat dinner, watch TV and sleep in the same building where generations of men and women before them slaved away for pennies an hour. They are residents of Clocktower Place, a two-phase apartment comple" that was built inside the old brick walls in the late 1980s.

Only the ghosts of the loud, dangerous cloth and textile machinery remain along that section of the Nashua River these days.