"Do pilgrims find their way to Indian Ridge,
Or journey onward to the far-off bridge,
And bring to younger ears the story back
Of the broad stream, the mighty Merrimack?"
The Merrimack drains the southern slopes of the White Mountains, and takes the outflow of Lake Winnipesaukee, a vast reservoir, the waters being regulated at its outlet to suit the wants of the mills below. It flows southward through New Hampshire into Massachusetts, turning northeast to the ocean. The river passes near Salisbury, where Daniel Webster was born in 1782; then, seventy-five miles northwest of Boston, comes to Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, which has a fine Capitol building and quarries of excellent granite; and eighteen miles below, it reaches Manchester, the chief city of New Hampshire, having sixty thousand people and many large mills owned by wealthy corporations. Here are the Amoskeag Falls (the Indian name meaning the "fishing-place"), the largest on the Merrimack, having fifty-five feet descent, and their water-power being utilized through two canals. The chief products are textile goods, locomotives and steam fire-engines. Eighteen miles farther southward the Nashua River comes up from the southwest, having passed the industrial town of Fitchburg on the way, and here at its confluence with the Merrimack is Nashua, another busy factory town. At Amherst, not far away, Horace Greeley was born in 1811. Crossing the boundary into Massachusetts, the river comes to the Pawtucket Falls, having thirty-two feet descent, and furnishing the water-power, twenty-six miles northwest of Boston, for the great mills of Lowell, the third city of Massachusetts, having a hundred thousand people, and spreading along the Merrimack at its confluence with Concord River, coming up from Concord Bridge of Revolutionary fame. The first mill was built at Lowell in 1823, and its industries have assumed a wide range and enormous output, though the operatives are nearly all French Canadians, and the language heard in this once Yankee mill-town is now mainly French. The Merrimack, having turned northeast, next comes to Lawrence, where it descends rapids of twenty-eight feet in the course of a half-mile. Here the Lawrence family, of which the noted Abbott Lawrence was the chief, established a town of cotton and woollen mills, utilizing the rapids by constructing a huge dam nine hundred feet long and thirty feet high, in 1845, at a cost of $250,000. Here are the great Pacific Mills, among the largest textile works in the world, and the city has over sixty thousand inhabitants. Nine miles farther down the river is Haverhill, another manufacturing town, with forty thousand people, largely engaged in shoemaking. The poet John G. Whittier was born in 1807 near Lake Kenoza, the scene of his Snowbound, on the northeastern verge of Haverhill.
Below Haverhill the Merrimack is a navigable, tidal stream, broadening into a spacious harbor at its mouth in the town of Newbury, where the "ancient sea-blown city" of Newburyport is built on the southern shore, while five miles to the westward, on the Pow-wow River, is Amesbury, long the home of Whittier, who died in 1892, after having celebrated this whole region in his poems. His house is maintained as a memorial. Newburyport long since turned its attention from commerce to making shoes and other manufactures, and it now has about eighteen thousand population. Its splendid High Street, upon the crest of the ridge, one of the noted tree-embowered highways of New England, stretches several miles parallel to the river, down towards the sea, bordered by the stately mansions of the olden time. The Merrimack sweeps grandly along in front of them with a broad curve to the ocean, three miles below. The Newburyport Marine Museum contains foreign curiosities brought home by the old-time sea captains, and the Public Library, endowed by George Peabody, occupies an impressive colonial mansion, which has been flavored by the entertainment of Generals Washington and Lafayette. The Old South Presbyterian Church has the body of the famous preacher George Whitefield, who died in Newburyport in 1770, interred in a vault under the pulpit. In a little wooden house behind this church, William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist, was born in 1805. Caleb Cushing the jurist and John B. Gough the temperance lecturer lived in Newburyport; but its resident who probably achieved the greatest notoriety in his day was "Lord" Timothy Dexter, an eccentric merchant of the eighteenth century, who made a large fortune by singular ventures, among them shipping a cargo of warming-pans to the West Indies, where they were sold to the planters at a stiff profit for boiling sugar.
Whittier's home was on the Merrimack, and he has written for the river a noble invocation:
"Stream of my fathers! sweetly still
The sunset rays thy valley fill;
Poured slantwise down the long defile,