Near the northern boundary of Massachusetts is the famous Merrimack
River, flowing northeastward into the Atlantic, and noted for the
enormous water-powers it provides for the various mill-towns that line
its banks. It is a vigorous stream, having frequent waterfalls and
carrying a powerful current, the name appropriately meaning "the swift
water." Oliver Wendell Holmes writes of it in _The School Boy_:
"Do pilgrims find their way to Indian Ridge,
Or journey onward to the far-off bridge,
And bring to younger ears the story back
Of the broad stream, the mighty Merrimack?"
The Merrimack drains the southern slopes of the White Mountains, and
takes the outflow of Lake Winnipesaukee, a vast reservoir, the waters
being regulated at its outlet to suit the wants of the mills below. It
flows southward through New Hampshire into Massachusetts, turning
northeast to the ocean. The river passes near Salisbury, where Daniel
Webster was born in 1782; then, seventy-five miles northwest of
Boston, comes to Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, which has a
fine Capitol building and quarries of excellent granite; and eighteen
miles below, it reaches Manchester, the chief city of New Hampshire,
having sixty thousand people and many large mills owned by wealthy
corporations. Here are the Amoskeag Falls (the Indian name meaning the
"fishing-place"), the largest on the Merrimack, having fifty-five feet
descent, and their water-power being utilized through two canals. The
chief products are textile goods, locomotives and steam fire-engines.
Eighteen miles farther southward the Nashua River comes up from the
southwest, having passed the industrial town of Fitchburg on the way,
and here at its confluence with the Merrimack is Nashua, another busy
factory town. At Amherst, not far away, Horace Greeley was born in
1811. Crossing the boundary into Massachusetts, the river comes to the
Pawtucket Falls, having thirty-two feet descent, and furnishing the
water-power, twenty-six miles northwest of Boston, for the great mills
of Lowell, the third city of Massachusetts, having a hundred thousand
people, and spreading along the Merrimack at its confluence with
Concord River, coming up from Concord Bridge of Revolutionary fame.
The first mill was built at Lowell in 1823, and its industries have
assumed a wide range and enormous output, though the operatives are
nearly all French Canadians, and the language heard in this once
Yankee mill-town is now mainly French. The Merrimack, having turned
northeast, next comes to Lawrence, where it descends rapids of
twenty-eight feet in the course of a half-mile. Here the Lawrence
family, of which the noted Abbott Lawrence was the chief, established
a town of cotton and woollen mills, utilizing the rapids by
constructing a huge dam nine hundred feet long and thirty feet high,
in 1845, at a cost of $250,000. Here are the great Pacific Mills,
among the largest textile works in the world, and the city has over
sixty thousand inhabitants. Nine miles farther down the river is
Haverhill, another manufacturing town, with forty thousand people,
largely engaged in shoemaking. The poet John G. Whittier was born in
1807 near Lake Kenoza, the scene of his _Snowbound_, on the
northeastern verge of Haverhill.
Below Haverhill the Merrimack is a navigable, tidal stream, broadening
into a spacious harbor at its mouth in the town of Newbury, where the
"ancient sea-blown city" of Newburyport is built on the southern
shore, while five miles to the westward, on the Pow-wow River, is
Amesbury, long the home of Whittier, who died in 1892, after having
celebrated this whole region in his poems. His house is maintained as
a memorial. Newburyport long since turned its attention from commerce
to making shoes and other manufactures, and it now has about eighteen
thousand population. Its splendid High Street, upon the crest of the
ridge, one of the noted tree-embowered highways of New England,
stretches several miles parallel to the river, down towards the sea,
bordered by the stately mansions of the olden time. The Merrimack
sweeps grandly along in front of them with a broad curve to the ocean,
three miles below. The Newburyport Marine Museum contains foreign
curiosities brought home by the old-time sea captains, and the Public
Library, endowed by George Peabody, occupies an impressive colonial
mansion, which has been flavored by the entertainment of Generals
Washington and Lafayette. The Old South Presbyterian Church has the
body of the famous preacher George Whitefield, who died in Newburyport
in 1770, interred in a vault under the pulpit. In a little wooden
house behind this church, William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist,
was born in 1805. Caleb Cushing the jurist and John B. Gough the
temperance lecturer lived in Newburyport; but its resident who
probably achieved the greatest notoriety in his day was "Lord" Timothy
Dexter, an eccentric merchant of the eighteenth century, who made a
large fortune by singular ventures, among them shipping a cargo of
warming-pans to the West Indies, where they were sold to the planters
at a stiff profit for boiling sugar.
Whittier's home was on the Merrimack, and he has written for the river
a noble invocation:
"Stream of my fathers! sweetly still
The sunset rays thy valley fill;
Poured slantwise down the long defile,
Wave, wood, and spire beneath them smile.
"Centuries ago, that harbor bar,
Stretching its length of foam afar,
And Salisbury's beach of shining sand,
And yonder island's wave-smoothed strand,
Saw the adventurer's tiny sail
Flit, stooping from the eastern gale;
And o'er these woods and waters broke
The cheer from Britain's hearts of oak,
As, brightly on the voyager's eye,
Weary of forest, sea and sky,
Breaking the dull continuous wood,
The Merrimack rolled down his flood.
"Home of my fathers! I have stood
Where Hudson rolled his lordly flood:
Seen sunrise rest and sunset fade
Along his frowning Palisade;
Looked down the Appalachian peak,
On Juniata's silver streak;
Have seen along his valley gleam
The Mohawk's softly winding stream;
The level light of sunset shine
Through broad Potomac's hem of pine;
And autumn's rainbow-tinted banner
Hang lightly o'er the Susquehanna;
Yet wheresoe'er his step might be,
Thy wandering child looked back to thee:
Heard in his dreams thy river's sound
Of murmuring on its pebbly bound,
The unforgotten swell and roar
Of waves on thy familiar shore."