Northern Canal - July 2007
I've fallen increasingly further behind with keeping this page up to date. I finally have the extra webspace I've been waiting on and I'm on vacation this week, so let's see if I can catch up...
Occasionally on Sundays, the National Park conducts tours of the otherwise off-limits Northern Canal Walkway. Since nobody else was up and about early on a cloudy Sunday morning, we got a private tour.
The Northern Canal was built in 1848 along with the Moody Street Feeder and completed Lowell's 5.6 mile long canal system. The canal and feeder were the ideas of Locks and Canals Chief Engineer James B. Francis, better known historially for the Francis Turbine and locally for the Francis Gate (see the page on the flood). The canal and feeder were not built to provide power to any particular millyard, but to increase and regulate hydropower to the entire system.
The canal begins at the School Street Bridge, at the large gatehouse along the side of it. This is slightly downriver of the entrance to the old Pawtucket Canal at Guard Locks / Francis Gate Park and right above the Pawtucket Dam. From here, the canal sits on a granite ledge right along the side of the river (following Pawtucket St) continuing under the University Ave Bridge. It turns to follow Father Morissette Blvd when Pawtucket St crosses the canal to go to the UMass dorms. From here, the canal is inland a good amount, following the Boulevard until it hits the Western Canal, right past the Wannalancit Mills. At this point, a few blocks to the south, the Moody Street Feeder begins at the Western Canal and continues underneath Moody Street until it hits the Feeder Gatehouse at Dutton Street and the Merrimack Canal. One thing I learned was that the Western Canal, which runs by North Common Village in the Acre, was actually reversed by this addition. While it previously flowed from the Pawtucket Canal into the river, it now runs from the Northern Canal (outside the Wannalancit Mills) to the Pawtucket Canal, and from the Northern Canal to the river.
The part of the Northern Canal from the Western Canal to where Pawtucket St crosses it is accessable at all times, but the part along the ledge from this bridge to School Street is restricted. This wasn't always the case. At some point in the distant past, this pathway was a popular date location, and postcards of late 19th century couples walking along its length are available.
Here we are standing in a pile of rust under the Pawtucket St bridge. I believe this bridge is as old as the canal. I made this same comment way back on page one when I was standing on top of it. The footbridge in front of us crosses the canal, and the yellow building past it sits on the edge of the canal, over a gate that allows excess water to run out of the canal and down into the Merrimack. The steel bridge behind that is the University Ave Bridge.
Looking away from University Ave from the footbridge is Boott Hydroelectric, which is somehow a direct descendant (owner?) of the original Locks and Canals Corporation that was formed when the Pawtucket Canal was built in the 1790s. This makes it one of the oldest corporations in America. Boott Hydro itself is owned by some Italian energy company today. You can see the top of UMass Lowell North Campus across the river.
A look at where we just were from the other side of the footbridge.
Low water under the University Ave Bridge. The water is all in the canals.
Directly under the University Ave Bridge. This bridge is well over 100 years old and is of similar construction to the one that fell in Minneapolis. Needless to say, looking at the condition of this bridge, that incident did nothing to help the safety reputation of this one. Back on page one I talked about how this is "Kerouac's Bridge" and will be torn down soon anyhow. For now, we don't allow any busses or anything that size or larger over it.
Past the University Ave Bridge and on our way to the School Street Bridge, we are now well along the Canal Wall. Note the water in the canal off to our left, and our height above the empty riverbed to the right.
The city and National Park would like this open to the public again, but it is both hard to maintain and too remote to keep safe. For most of its length, it is completely invisible to and inaccessable from the dense city all around it.
A family of ducks in the canal. The dynamited walls and cut blocks must've been quite the feat back before modern equipment.
Further still up the canal, the sheer cliff wall separating us from the river to our right becomes a forested island...
...with unexplainable steps down to it...
...and then the stone and concrete pathway becomes dirt. We are a few hundred yards from the extremely busy School Street Bridge, and it looks like we're way out in the woods somewhere.
A curve in the canal near the end of our walk, looking behind us.
The canal side of the School Street Bridge - well, the short bridge on School Street over the canal before the bridge becomes the School Street Bridge over the Merrimack. This is a bridge of many names. Some call it the School Street Bridge since it carries School Street over the river (where it becomes the Mammoth Road, a pre-Lowell 'highway' into Southern New Hampshire). Some say the School Street Bridge is the bridge that carries School Street over the Pawtucket Canal, separating the Acre from the Lower Highlands. Some people call it the Pawtucket Falls Bridge, since it's next to the falls. I have an old postcard that simply calls it the Pawtucketville Bridge, after the neighborhood on the other side that is connected to the city center by it. Its official name is the O'Donnell Bridge either way. Similar confusion exists with the Aiken Street (or Oulette) Bridge. No matter what the name of the Pawtucket Falls/School Street/O'Donnell Bridge is, this is the location of the oldest Merrimack crossing in Lowell. Well before the city was founded, a few different toll bridges existed at this location, allowing people to cross from what was then on one bank East Chelmsford, to what was then West Dracut. East Chelmsford became Lowell, and West Dracut became Pawtucketville, later annexed to Lowell. The name Pawtucket dates to pre-contact times, when this area near the top of the falls was one of the best salmon fisheries on the Merrimack. The construction of the dam and the pollution industrialization brought to the river ended all that.
This lock chamber under the bridge allows traffic from the Merrimack to safely pass into the Northern Canal and vice versa. I believe the National Park occasionally uses it still.
Up and over the bridge to the gatehouse on the other side of the street, looking across the river to the Pawtucketville McDonald's. Where McDonald's is today used to be a package store or a bar I guess that said "Wine and Spirits" on it. I remember my mom teasing me because I used to think it said "Sprits" and was therefore a hair place. Maybe for the best, because I'm sure if I knew it said "spirits" I would've thought of ghosts, which fits even stranger with wine. A few years ago I got to go in the gatehouse for Doors Open Lowell, and I wish I had pictures of that. It's wicked cool in there. This gatehouse controls a set of wooden gates beneath it that control the inflow into the Northern Canal. Although originally powered by the canal itself, these gates are now electrically (and remotely!) controlled by Boott Hydro. The fresh wooden boards in the foreground sit on top of the Pawtucket Dam and are designed to burst under too much water - another mechanism to keep the canals in working order year round in all conditions. Again, the flood page back a few has some pictures of them all demolished by rain and ice, at high and low levels of the river. You can make out on the bridge piers white paint that removed grafitti. I don't know who's crazier - the people that go out there to vandalize bridge piers, or the poor maintenance guys that have to remove it.
Nice fresh planks! The river is actually fairly low right now in general. Often a little water is spilling over the top. I'm not sure if this was from lack of rain (we did have a dry spell) or if the river is just being kept low by the powers that control our water. The latter is a scary sight - it wasn't too long ago that the river was drained down, and I was in Tyngsboro freaked that it was running dry, unknown to me that the government could just do that for repairs or whatever. Barely visible on the far side of the dam is a fish ladder and a fish elevator - designed to help fish make it over the dam, in an attempt to restore some of the fish population to the Merrimack. It must work, because I've seen fishing birds around the falls.
There is some sort of boating club a little further above the falls. Although I've always questioned the logic of boating above a waterfall at all, these buoys apparently mark the point after which the current might pull you over the edge.
Yet there is this old looking repair shed (I think a blacksmith way back?) and little boat right by the gatehouse. I think they do repairs to the gates/locks/dam in this thing.
The door to the gatehouse - why would anyone kick it in?
Right here, right in Lowell, we have a genuine NATIONAL HISTORIC MECHANICAL ENGINEERING LANDMARK. We should, with the amount of machinery that was invented here.
This underkept house I think used to belong to the gatekeeper. The villages on both sides of this bridge go back even further than the original bridge at this location, which again pre-date Lowell by quite a bit. There is at least one colonial-era house (The Spalding House on Pawtucket St) in the area.
The Pawtucket Congregational Church has been at the falls at Mammoth Road and Varnum Avenue since this was West Dracut. Although the church building isn't as old, the congregation at this location dates to before 1800.
The Franco-American School at School and Pawtucket Streets. This Catholic grade school was built as a mansion for one of the Ayers in 1870. In 1908, it became an orphanage, then later a boarding school, then a day school. Another building I was in for Doors Open Lowell but have no pictures of, a lot of the original house still looks like a 19th century mansion inside. The grotto behind it is known to Kerouac readers, and as a historical tidbit, General Patton has some sort of connection to this building - he married an Ayer in 1910.
Corey Sciuto (e-mail)
2007