Lowell, Massachusetts (Part 22)

Part 22 - Nashua and Cohoes - 2008

Continuing my break from Lowell, I'm going to talk a little about Nashua, then the small upsate New York city of Cohoes.

Considering the fact that I'm from Tyngsboro and went to high school in Nashua, you think I'd know a good amount about it, however, I really don't. I didn't even know Nashua was a city until I went to high school there. Me, and seemingly many people from Massachusetts, don't know much about the place beyond the strip-mall lined Daniel Webster "Highway" just over the state line. However, Nashua actually has a history and a downtown, and there is a large park along the Nashua River called Mine Falls that is one of my favorite places to go for a walk. So, I'll put a few pictures of those up from last summer and fall.

Map of the park, showing the Nashua River at the top and the Nashua Canal at the bottom. Both flow from left to right.

Nashua's city website has a pretty good history up here.

Nashua began as part of Dunstable, Massachusetts in the mid-17th century. When the state border was finally settled, amazingly not until 1740, Dunstable ended up on both sides of the line, becoming Dunstable, MA and Dunstable NH. In the 1820s century, with industrialization spreading along the Merrimack, businessmen in Dunstable, NH decided to begin their own textile city. Building a three mile long canal along the Nashua river towards where downtown Nashua is today, they founded the Nashua Manufacturing Company in 1823, and a decade later, the town's name changed from Dunstable to Nashua as well.

Main Street. Nashua's downtown runs a website at www.greatamericandowntown.org

The city grew around the mills and actually had a brief falling out where it split into two cities for a few years over the placement of the new city hall. Nashua's City Hall is on the south end of downtown and the north end of the city decided they didn't like that and became Nashville for a bit. Nashua City Hall, I believe, is also where Kennedy announced his candidacy for president - there's a commemorative statue out in front. I wish I had more pictures of downtown, but this is the only one I took. It was oppressively hot that day and we had been walking for miles. Some good restaurants and architecture in downtown Nashua...

The dam at Mines Falls, now runs a hydroelectric station.

The canal.

The Nashua river, while a major tributary of the Merrimack, is not a large nor powerful river. The canal needed to be so long, I can only imagine, to get enough elevation above the river for a decent height to drop the water. It is evident walking along the sloping earthen paths between the canal and the meandering and slowly decending river that the closer you walk to downtown, the more elevation you are gaining over the river as it drops below your almost steady elevation. The paths you walk on become progressively higher and higher, seemingly built as a huge mound of dirt with a canal dug through the middle. This looks to me like it would've been an awful lot of work to build in the 1820s, and even at that, with the limited power supply and sandwiched between Lowell and Manchester, Nashua was never a large textile city, and had a diverse industrial base. It was also comparatively small city population-wise until well after the Second World War.

The canal during the fall.

A bend in the river.

You won't see too many things like this living in Lowell's canals!

The Nashua Mfg. Company failed right after World War II, and that basically spelled the end of textile manufacturing in the city. Defense contractors and smaller businesses moved in. It looks to me like at some point, a lot of the canal was filled in or at least covered and turned into a parking lot. This last picture is making sure that people new to town know where they are.

A view to the millyard and downtown Nashua from Mines Falls, over the Oxbow lake.

Nashua has twice been rated the best place to live in America by Forbes, once in the 80s, once in the 90s. How does this happen when all of the other mill cities are struggling? A few reasons I think: First off, Nashua wasn't really much of a city until the era of the automobile. The pre-war city around the mills is small, whereas the boundaries of the City of Nashua make it a few times larger than Lowell, but with 15,000 fewer people. That means much of Nashua looks like a suburb and lives like one. Secondly, location. New Hampshire has no sales or income taxes and Nashua is closer to Boston than much of Massachusetts is. So not only does that work out well for those that live there, but the big-box retail sector that Nashua is really known for today must earn a killing off of out-of-staters for what is the second largest city in the state, second by about 15,000 residents to Manchester. Oh, and since other than Nashua and Manchester and maybe Concord, every other place in New Hampshire has the population of a mid-sized Massachusetts town at best, all the jobs seem to be in one of those three (or more likely Massachusetts) :-). I kid because I love...I think.

Capitalism is alive and well in the Gate City!

Today, the Nashua Manufacturing Company is an apartment complex called Clocktower Place. The buildings behind the octagonal stairtower must be the original 1823 mills. The connecting section that says 1823 is probably newer. From old postcards, it looks like what I am standing on here used to be the canal.

The clocktowers! As you can see, I took one picture on my way in, and another on my way out, hence the time difference.

Cohoes - 2008

I had a lot of text here describing what I know about New York State's Capital District from my few years of living there, and the more I dug to better explain the few pictures I wanted to share, the more I realized I wasn't being fair with my negativity of an area as rich in history as my own, even if we are economically better off than them today. Being part of the Boston Metro and the New Economy has done wonders for us, but perhaps revitalization will come to upstate New York someday well. I know there are certainly people fighting for it. Additionally, my knowledge of the Harmony Mill site, which is what these photos are of, is really limited. All I know is that this is a fantastic mill overlooking a fantastic vista with a history I know almost nothing about. So, I'm going to defer most of the history to the National Park paper I found while trying to dig up info here. I like this page as well.

Upriver of Albany and Troy is the confluence of the Mohawk river into the much larger Hudson, and the original path of the Erie Canal on its way to Schenectady. This is a picture of 86 foot tall Cohoes Falls during a pretty good flow. Note the cliff walls above the river below the falls. I've never seen anything like it in New England. I had only been here once before, and there was barely any water at all that time (I think I was told there was cliff diving done here, which I'm not sure I believe). I guess they divert a lot of it to power companies or the barge canal, which is the "new" Erie Canal, although I guess even it is rarely used for transport. I also just read that they finished a park here since I last visited.

Something else I've never seen in New England, even though we do have them - a Bald Eagle! Must be watching for fish under the falls?

Cohoes has 15,000 residents, and is clearly "A Community that Cares." The Harmony Mills were founded in Cohoes for textile manufacturing in 1836, utilizing water power that had been provided a few years before by what sounds like a Locks and Canals style company. The mill we are looking at here, Harmony Mill #3, was built right after the Civil War and is incredibly fancy for a factory. I guess this is what, Second Empire styling? Too bad some of the architectural detailing is gone - even pictures from 40 years ago show those towers naked, an old postcard shows tall roofs less ornate than those on the central sections. Apparently they were taken down after a the hurricane of 1938 that also flooded Lowell. The sandstone window arches seem to be a lost cause, and this brick is a very, very strange color, almost orange. According to that yellow sign in the distance, it looks like they're trying to get residences in here.

The central section above the entrance to Harmony Mill #3. That's a statue of company president Mr. Garner up there, not Mr. Harmony (There was a Mr. Harmony originally!). You can sort of tell from the last picture that this mill is really long - when it was built, it was supposedly the longest in the world, at over 1,100 feet. Therefore, it's at least 300 feet shorter than the Wood Mill at Lawrence but 35 years its senior, and built in a far less utilitarian style.

Harmony #3, or the Mastadon Mill, is probably best known however for being the site where the Cohoes Mastadon skeleton was dug up.

Worker housing. Different in concept from the Waltham/Lowell system boardinghouses we're used to.

This strangely exposed photo is of the power house, the gabled Harmony Mill #1 on the right (1830s-1850s), and another Harmony building's tower way in the background. That one, I guess they bought, and added the tower for achitectural unity. Scary how a company wealthy enough to blow money on stuff like that can disappear so quickly. Harmony #2, which was between here and the tower in the distance, was built in the 1850s and burnt down over 10 years ago. Just about all the canals that powered these factories have been filled in or covered. Sometimes, an interest in preservation simply comes too late...

Jen took these pictures, and thought this barnstar was really cool. Plenty of these on old buildings in Lowell...