The Mill That Built a City RoadyGoat

Manchester was built around a single, staggering enterprise: the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which by the late nineteenth century was the largest cotton textile plant on earth. Strung along the Merrimack River, Amoskeag grew to some thirty buildings and roughly seventeen thousand workers at its peak. Its Mill No. 11 was the world's largest cotton mill, nine hundred feet long and packed with four thousand looms; the company even supplied denim for the first Levi's jeans. The whole city was essentially company-planned around the waterpower. Then the twentieth century turned: the textile industry drifted south, and Amoskeag went bankrupt in 1935, gutting the local economy almost overnight. The brick mills didn't vanish, though. Today they're reborn as offices, restaurants, software firms, college campuses, apartments, and a museum, a riverfront monument to one of America's great industrial rises and falls.

America's Stonehenge RoadyGoat

1907

At 103 Haverhill Road in Salem, New Hampshire, a tangle of stone walls, chambers, and a slab dubbed the 'Sacrificial Table' sprawls across about thirty acres of pine-covered hill. Boosters call it America's Stonehenge and claim a pre-Columbian European origin, but that is widely regarded as pseudoarchaeology. The site appears in print as early as the 1907 'History of Salem' as 'Jonathan Pattee's Cave,' a 19th-century farmstead. Radiocarbon charcoal shows people were on the land roughly 4,000 years ago, but archaeologists (including David Starbuck) attribute most of the visible structures to colonial-era farm use plus reconstruction by owner William Goodwin, who bought the place in 1937. The 'mystery' is real mostly because the rebuilding muddied the record. Named America's Stonehenge by the Stone family, who bought it in 1956.

16.4 mi away

Amoskeag Manufacturing Company

1838

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company operated the largest textile manufacturing complex in the world, stretching over a mile along the Merrimack River in Manchester.

Robert Frost Farm

1900

Robert Frost lived and farmed here from 1900 to 1911, writing many of his most famous poems including 'Mending Wall' and 'After Apple-Picking.'

11.5 mi away

Alan Shepard Birthplace - East Derry

1923

Alan Shepard was born in East Derry in 1923 and became the first American in space on May 5, 1961, aboard Freedom 7.

11.5 mi away

New Hampshire Secretary of State - Primary Filing

1920

Since 1920, New Hampshire has held the first presidential primary in the nation, a tradition fiercely protected by state law.

15.2 mi away

McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center

1986

Built in 1990 in memory of Concord teacher Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.

15.8 mi away

New Hampshire State House

1819

Built in 1819 from New Hampshire granite, it is the oldest state capitol building in which the legislature still meets in its original chambers.

15.2 mi away

Manchester, New Hampshire

Music in Manchester

Songs About Manchester

Artists From Manchester

Rivers & Roads in Song near Manchester

History of Manchester