page_title: North Adams, Massachusetts
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: North Adams, Massachusetts / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: English: Bird's-eye View of North Adams, MA; from a 1905 postcard published by the Detroit Photographic Company.
context_page_description: North Adams is a city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. Its population was 13,708 as of the 2010 census. Best known as the home of the largest contemporary art museum in the United States, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams has in recent years become a center for tourism, culture and recreation.
context_section_description: North Adams was first settled in 1745 during King George's War. During the war, Canadian and Native American forces laid siege to Fort Massachusetts (The Fort's chimney, a stone replica constructed in the 20th century, is located at the rear of the former Price Chopper Supermarket,  behind the former Friendly's).  30 prisoners were taken to Quebec; half died in captivity.
  The town was incorporated separately from Adams in 1878, and reincorporated as a city in 1895. The city is named in honor of Samuel Adams, a leader in the American Revolution, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and governor of Massachusetts.
  For much of its history, North Adams was a mill town. Manufacturing began in the city before the Revolutionary War, largely because the confluence of the Hoosic River's two branches provided water power for small-scale industry. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, businesses included wholesale shoe manufacturers; a brick yard; a saw mill; cabinet-makers; hat manufacturers; machine shops for the construction of mill machines; marble works; wagon and sleigh-makers; and an ironworks, which provided the pig iron for armor plates on the Civil War ship, the Monitor.
  Expansion westwards started with the creation of three mill Villages, Blackinton in 1821, Greylock in 
  1846 and Braytonville in 1832, located to take advantage of the Hoosac River's water power.  The 1850 census marked the official shift of the town from agriculture to industry, since more factory workers than farmers now resided in the town.  The use of Chinese strikebreakers in 1870, from California to break the North Adams strike of shoe workers was a step in the movement of Chinese from the West coast to the East coast, resulting in East coast Chinatowns in the United States.  North Adams was also the headquarters for building the Hoosac Tunnel starting in 1851 and completed in 1874, adding an east-west connection to Boston and Albany to the existing 1842 rail connection to New York.  Prior to that time, inter-regional travel was limited to weekly stagecoaches from Albany and Greenfield.
  Downtown in 1860, Oliver Arnold and Company was established with the latest equipment for printing cloth. Large government contracts to supply fabric for the Union Army helped the business prosper. During the next four decades, Arnold Print Works became one of the world's leading manufacturers of printed textiles. It also became the largest employer in North Adams, with some 3,200 workers by 1905. Despite decades of success, falling cloth prices and the lingering effects of the Great Depression forced the company to close its Marshall Street operation in 1942 and consolidated at smaller facilities in Adams.
caption: Bird's eye view of North Adams in 1905
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