The Merrimack River: its source and its tributaries. Embracing a history of manufactures, and of the towns along its course; their geography, topography, and products, with a description of the magnificent natural scenery about its upper waters./ By J. W. Meader.

THE MEPRIMAC] RI?IER;
surate with their requirements, cheap, unfailing, and efficient. The
sagacity which had led to successful experiments, inventions, and
improvements, and which afterwards resulted equally profitable to
themselves and the country, turned their attention to the broad and
beautiful Merrimack, in whose great volume and splendid falls they
found the motor which possessed the requisite qualification, and
around the Falls of Pawtucket the first act of the domestic manufacturing drama of these great actors is seen in the fifty huge factories
and the forty thousand people of Lowell, the growth of only a generation. The individuals who were mainly instrumental in the introduction and progress of manufacturing on the Merrimack were
Nathan Appleton, Francis Cabot Lowell (in honor of whom the
city of'Lowell was named), Patrick Tracy Jackson, Kirk Boott,
Ezra Worthen, Paul Moody, and others. The two last named, having previously had considerable experience in the business at Amesbury, were practical men and of great aid to the enterprise.
The system which they devised has had able coadjutors, and,
though they brought machinery to a marvellous state of perfection,
still improvements in minor details have constantly been made; the
power-loom, however, except in the substitution of the crank for the
cam motion and the increased rate of speed, remains substantially
the same. Previous to this time each branch, carding, spinning,
weaving, etc., was a separate business, and the transfer of the stock
from mill to mill in undergoing the successive processes in the routine of manufacturing, was unnecessarily slow, inconvenient, and
expensive, but these individuals perfected an organization of the
business which dispensed with these primitive methods by building
mills of sufficient size to consummate the whole process under one
roof beginning with the raw material and turning out the finished
fabric. From this grand beginning at Lowell manufacturing has
extended along the Merrimack, above and below, until the valley of
the Merrimack, excepting narrow intervening spaces, is one continuous manufacturing community.
" The Wamesits lived at the forks of the Merrimack and Concord
Rivers, and upon both sides of the latter river.
"Wamesit is derived from wame (all, or whole), and auke (a
place), with the letter s thrown in betwixt the two syllables for the
sake of the sound. The Indian village at this place undoubtedly
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