page_title: Merrimack Valley
section_title: Industrial revolution
hierarchical_section_title: Merrimack Valley / History and culture / Industrial revolution
caption_attribution_description: English: Manchester, New Hampshire. This was taken from the top of the 1000 Elm tower.
context_page_description: The Merrimack Valley is a bi-state region along the Merrimack River in the U.S. states of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The Merrimack is one of the larger waterways in the New England region and has helped define the livelihood and culture of those living along it since native times.
  Major cities in the Merrimack Valley include Concord, Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire, as well as Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, in Massachusetts. The Merrimack Valley was a major center of the textile industry in America during the 19th century.
context_section_description: While the Merrimack had been used for small manufacturing concerns for decades, in the early 1820s, a group of investors from Boston founded the city of Lowell, to take advantage of the 32-foot (9.8 m) drop of the Merrimack over the Pawtucket Falls. Lowell, the first large-scale planned textile center in America, remained the nation's largest into the 1850s. Textile production spread up and down the Merrimack Valley in both states for the next century, but eventually was eclipsed after the Second World War.
  Manchester's Amoskeag Mills was once the largest cotton textile plant in the world. Other major textile companies based in the Merrimack Valley included the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in Lowell, the American Woolen Company in Lawrence (headquarters moved to Andover in 1919), Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, and the Nashua Manufacturing Company in its namesake city. Lawrence was the site of the Bread and Roses strike, a landmark event in the history of labor relations in the United States.
caption: The Amoskeag Mills in West Manchester, New Hampshire, circa 2006.  The massive structure once housed the largest cotton textile manufacturing plant in the world.  Since the late 20th century, it has been rehabilitated for mixed use development.
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