Pawtucket Canal
The Pawtucket Canal was finished in 1796. It was built to circumvent the Pawtucket Falls of the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, now Lowell, Massachusetts. The Pawtucket Falls are a mile long series of falls and rapids that drop the Merrimack River 32 feet. This drop hampered the shipment of goods, mostly lumber to the mouth of the Merrimack and the port of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Newburyport was one of the largest shipbuilding centers in New England and a steady supply of wood from New Hampshire was critical to the industry. The canal was built by wealthy Boston merchants who formed a limited liability corporation called the Proprietors of Locks and Canals, one of the first of its kind in the United States. This corporation is still in existence today and still owns and operates the canal. Within a decade was built the Middlesex Canal connecting the Merrimack directly with Boston, Massachusetts. Bringing goods directly to Boston was more advantageous for merchants and the Pawtucket Canal fell out of favor, but not for long. The Boston Associates, having successfully built upon Francis Cabot Lowell, and Paul Moody's work in builing a succesfully integrated cotton mill at Waltham, Massachusetts on the Charles River were looking for a site that offered more water power. The Pawtucket Falls of the Merrimack River offered the water power that the Associates needed. In 1821 they bought the Proprietors of Locks and Canals and with it the water rights of the Merrimack River upstream from the Pawtucket Falls. The Pawtucket Canal was deepened to become a power canal, and the first of 5.6 miles of canals in the soon to be named City of Lowell, Massachusetts. The first canal built off the Pawtucket Canal was the Merrimack Canal, which powered the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, thus starting the Lowell experiment, and the first planned industrial city in the United States.
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