- Historic Sites Reinventing A River Its waters drove our first
Industrial Revolution—and were poisoned by it. Thoreau believed
the Merrimack might not run pure again for thousands of years,
but today it is a welcoming pathway through a hundred-mile-long
red-brick museum of America’s rise to power. April/May 2003 |
Volume 54, Issue 2 The river runs through Concord, New
Hampshire, but somehow the state capital is not a river town.
Concord sits back from the water, and unlike every other city on
the route, it lacks massive squat brick mills, favoring instead
graceful Victorian architecture and granite buildings designed
to impress people with the seriousness of government. The first
of the great Merrimack mill towns is Manchester, about 20 miles
to the south. On a sunny Sunday in August, the water is so clear
we can read the labels on the refrigerators and tires dumped in
the past and not yet cleared away; the air is pure, the scene
quiet. Even as we skim past a full mile of mill buildings, it
just doesn’t seem