ABSTRACT
The textile mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company1 date back to the 1830s, when a group of Boston entrepreneurs purchased the water power for the Merrimack River and a 15,000-acre plot of land across the Amoskeag Falls with the intent of building an industrial city centered around textile manufacturing. The company mills, located in the town of Manchester, New Hampshire, closed in 1936 after struggling for most of the preceding forty years to be competitive with the growing southern textile producers, who possessed cheaper labor, newer technology, and a closer proximity to raw materials. The decline in the company’s fortunes became especially precipitous following the depression of the early 1920s and the pivotal strike of 1922. The Amoskeag mills failed to earn a profit in four of the seven remaining years of the decade, and the loss in 1924 alone exceeded the combined profit of the three profitable years (Creamer and Coulter 1971:204).
