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.

ITS SO URCE AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.
thirty miles. The charter required that the company should push
its business so rapidly that vessels of twenty or more tons could
reach Hunt's Falls, near Lowell, at the ordinary stages of the water,
within three years. The company, foreseeing that it could not be
done, did not make the attempt, but has confined its efforts to securing the removal of these legislative restrictions. Should this, very
properly, be done, the company will then be in condition to accomplish a work of great value to all whose business is much with or on
the river. The current of the Merrimack is so rapid and strong as
to necessitate a continual and extensive outlay of labor and capital
to maintain an available ship channel. Added to this, much of the
business done on the river has the effect to increase its natural tendency to obstruct or obliterate any artificial channel. Its annual,
often semi-annual, rise of twenty or more feet, the snags and driftwood brought down by these resistless floods, the constant fretting
of the banks, the washing in of vast deposits, the constant plying of
heavy boats, barges, and rafts, and the annual "drive" of many
millions feet of saw-logs, all conspire to affect the channel more or
less. Of this last great business, the lumber trade, a brief historical
sketch cannot fail to be interesting.
In 1844, Nicholas G. Norcross, who had already made himself
rich, and earned the title of "The New England Timber King," on
the Penobscot, came to Lowell and established himself permanently
on the Merrimack. Prior to that time timber had been brought
downs in rafts, locking around the falls; altogether a slow and tedious process. Mr. Norcross prefaced his operations by the outlay
of more than one hundred thousand dollars in improving the channel
and adapting it to his purposes. He blasted rocks and removed obstructions, bought land and provided for the stringing of booms for
timber harbors, bought rights on some of the important falls, built
two dams on the Pemigewasset at Woodstock, and purchased the
Elkins grant of eighty thousand acres of heavy timber adjoining
the above-named town, Lincoln, and several others. I-le also bought
a tract of forty thousand acres in the ungranted lands of New Ilamp shire, and several other tracts.' Having prepared the river to receive
the logs and for the "drive," the mode of proceeding was to repair
to the timber forests with a force of choppers, some one hundred and
fifty or two hundred men, cut and haul the logs for the coming
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