Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/18

6 navigable water of the Merrimack river at Concord.

Short side canals with locks were subsequently built at the junctions of the Nashua and Piscataquog rivers with the Merrimack to facilitate the passage of boats from the Merrimack to the storehouses in Nashua and Piscataquog villages.

For forty years this line of canals formed the principal channel of heavy transportation beweenbetween [sic] the two capitals, and, except that the canals did not effectually compete with the stages for carrying passengers, they held the same position to transportation as is now held by their successor and destroyer—the railroad.

During the entire season of open river, from the time that the spring break-up of winter ice permitted navigation to commence, until the frosts of fall again closed it, this eighty-five miles of water was thronged with boats, taking the products of the country to a market at the New England metropolis, and returning loaded with salt, lime, cement, plaster, hardware, leather, liquors, iron, glass, grindstones, cordage, paints, oils, and all that infinite variety of merchandise required by country merchants, formerly classed under the general terms of "dry and West India goods." The original bills of lading, many of which are now in the writer's possession, also show that they brought up from Boston for consumption in the

country, flour, corn, butter, and cheese, which plainly indicates that the people of the Merrimack river valley gave more attention in those days to lumbering and river navigation than to agriculture.

These boats, of which there are probably none now in existence, were peculiarly constructed, to answer the requirements of the river and canal navigation, and their mode of propulsion was as peculiar as their model. They were about seventy-five feet long and nine feet wide in the middle; a little narrower at the ends; flat bottomed across their full width, but the bottom sloped or rounded up from near the mid-length of the boat, both towards stem and stern, so that while