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Manchester, the Mills and the Immigrants

© Christina Coruth

This book is no longer in print, so you will have to go to the library to get it. It's excellent -- I highly recommend it! A reorganization of the book by the same author is now in print and listed at the end of this article.

Manchester, the Mills and the Immigrants by Gary Samson is a story well told in prose and photographs of a city that was created because of the Industrial Revolution. It is a historical and social portrait of the times and the people who struggled to make a life under harsh conditions.

New Hampshire natives, particularly those who are familiar with Manchester, are in for a special treat as you see Manchester’s Elm Street traffic in the form of horse drawn wagons or trolley cars. Some photographs are bittersweet such as the photo of the Smyth Mansion, a beautiful brick home constructed in 1869 overlooking the Amoskeag falls, that was demolished in 1969 to make way for a parking lot. At other times, you may want to have the magnifying glass handy to take a closer look at a street you know or a building that looks familiar, perhaps taken well before you were born.

Samson opens with a brief history of how Manchester became a major industrial center specializing in the manufacture of cotton and woolen textiles. Modeled after the English industrial city of Manchester, the New Hampshire city soon overtook it’s British counterpart as an industrial powerhouse. Three key ingredients came together to create the largest city in the State:
1) The Merrimack River which bisects the city and produced the hydro power necessary for manufacturing in the 19th century.
2) The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company which built 30 major mills that covered eight million square feet of floor space.
3) And the workforce. Local workers were too few to fill all the jobs created by the mills. Immigrants from Ireland, Greece, England, Canada, and many other places worked in the Amoskeag mills.

However, no profile of Manchester could be made without the story of the French immigrants from Canada. Samson correctly focuses his attention on this group, who would make a tremendous impact on Manchester’s culture, politics, and growth as a thriving industrial city. French Canadians created Manchester’s “Le Petit Canada,” a West Side community which would evolve into a city wide Franco-American community. A hard working people, the French Canadians kept their cultural identity by maintaining their traditions and language, yet assimilating into their new home.

The copyright of the article Manchester, the Mills and the Immigrants in New Hampshire is owned by Christina Coruth. Permission to republish Manchester, the Mills and the Immigrants in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.