Canal Heritage Days

This coming weekend, the Lowell National Historical Park and the Middlesex Canal Commission Billerica Section will celebrate Canal Heritage Days with a wide variety of interesting activities. For the schedule, directions and more information check out http://www.nps.gov/lowe/2002/canalheritage/ and http://www.middlesexcanal.org/. Canals are an integral part of Lowell’s history with the earliest ones predating the city itself. In America, rivers were the highways of the Eighteenth Century and so the Merrimack was the logical route for transporting timber and furs from New Hampshire to the Atlantic. At one point, however, waterfalls and rapids made the Merrimack impassible for boats. In the late 1700s, a group of businessmen built the Pawtucket Canal in an attempt to bypass these obstacles. This was initially successful, but a rival company soon constructed the Middlesex Canal, connecting the Merrimack to the Charles River and the port of Boston. The company running the Pawtucket Canal soon went out of business. But when the Industrial Revolution in America took off in the 1820s with water power as the primary means of power generation, the existence of the Pawtucket Canal caused developers of the day to chose it as the site for the first planned industrial city in the world. The water flowing through this failed transportation canal went on to power the textile mills that made Lowell famous.