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NH · Textile era 1838–1936

New Hampshire

Manchester and the Amoskeag Empire

New Hampshire is the home of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester—in the 1910s one of the largest textile complexes in the world, employing more than seventeen thousand workers in mills stretching along the Merrimack. Amoskeag's rise, paternalistic peak, 1922 strike, and collapse in the mid-1930s remain among the most studied cases of corporate paternalism in American labor history.

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company along the Merrimack at Manchester-once the largest cotton mill complex in the world.
The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company along the Merrimack at Manchester-once the largest cotton mill complex in the world.Alphonso H. Sanborn (publisher), Amoskeag Manufacturing Company looking down the Merrimack River, Manchester, postcard, c. 1911. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company laid out the city of Manchester in 1838, planning its streets, mill yard, and worker housing together. By the 1910s the company employed more than seventeen thousand people in a millyard of brick buildings stretching more than a mile along the Merrimack, many of them French-Canadian, Greek, Polish, and other immigrants. Amoskeag ran an extensive welfare program—a textile school, playgrounds, a dental clinic, sports teams, and home-ownership plans—that made it a showcase of industrial paternalism. In 1918 the United Textile Workers organized much of the workforce. The 1922 strike, called against a twenty-percent wage cut and an increase in hours from forty-eight to fifty-four, lasted some nine months and left lasting bitterness. Through a 1925 reorganization the company's cash reserves were separated into a holding company, a move critics blamed for starving the mills of investment. Amoskeag filed for bankruptcy on December 24, 1935; after the great flood of March 1936 and a federal court's decision against reorganization, the mills were liquidated. A citizens' group bought the millyard, which now houses a museum, a college campus, offices, and apartments.

What remains

Manchester's Millyard Museum and the SEE Science Center occupy buildings that once held looms. Lewis Hine photographed child workers at Amoskeag in 1909 for the National Child Labor Committee, and the oral histories collected by Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach remain a landmark of American labor history.

Stories set here

Sources

  1. ScholarshipSource Set: Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. New Hampshire Historical Society (Moose).
  2. Archive / museumAmoskeag Manufacturing Company (resource guide). Manchester Historic Association.
  3. ScholarshipTamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langenbach. Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City. Pantheon Books, 1978.

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