In 1793, the proprietors of the Middlesex Canal were incorporated. Loammi Baldwin, of Woburn, superintended the construction. The canal began at the Merrimack, about a mile above Pawtucket Falls, extended south by east thirty-one miles, and terminated at Charlestown. It was twenty-four feet wide and four feet deep and was fed by the Concord River. It cost $700,000, and was completed in 1804,—the first canal in the United States opened for the transportation of passengers and merchandise. For forty years it was the outlet of the whole Merrimack valley north of Pawtucket Falls.
The first boat voyage from Boston, by the Middlesex Canal and the Merrimack River, to Concord, New Hampshire, was made in 1814; the first steamboat from Boston reached Concord in 1819.
The competition of the Middlesex Canal ruined the Pawtucket Canal, as it in turn, in after years, was ruined by the Boston and Lowell Railroad. Navigation finally ceased on its waters in 1853, since which date its channel has been filling up and its banks have been falling away.
In 1801, Moses Hale, whose father had long before started a fulling-mill in Dracut, established a carding-mill on River Meadow Brook,—the first enterprise of the kind in Middlesex County.
In 1805, the bridge across the Merrimack was demolished and a new bridge with stone piers and abutments was constructed. It was a toll-bridge as late as 1860.
The second war with England stimulated manufacturing enterprises throughout the United States; and several were started, depending upon the water-power of the Concord River. In 1813, Captain Phineas Whiting and Major Josiah Fletcher erected a wooden cotton-mill on the site of the Middlesex Company's mills, and were successful in their enterprise. John Golding, in the same neighborhood, was not so fortunate.
The year 1815 is memorable for the most disastrous gale that has devastated New England during two centuries; it was very severe in Chelmsford.
The sawmill and gristmill of the Messrs. Bowers, at Pawtucket Falls, was started in 1816. The same year Nathan Tyler started a gristmill where the Middlesex Company's mill No. 3 now stands. Captain John Ford's sawmill stood near the junction of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.