Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/21

Rh sails as the boats drove before the wind.

This part of the river had also upon it, for three or four years subsequent to 1834, a fair-sized steamboat, plying for passengers and freight between Nashua and Lowell. She was commanded one season by Capt. Jacob Vanderbilt of Staten Island, New York, brother to the late Commodore Vanderbilt. In the early part of the season, while the water of the river was at its highest stages, it was also thronged with logs and lumber being taken down for market. The larger falls being impassable except by their canals the logs and lumber had necessarily to be bound into rafts of such dimensions as would pass through the locks. And at the larger canals, such as the Amoskeag and Middlesex, the labor of locking down and towing these rafts—called shots—was very considerable and consumed much time. Between canals these shots were bound together into large rafts of eight or ten shots, called bands, and floated down with the current, generally at high water, avoiding the locks at the smaller canals by running the falls. Many of these rafts continued down the river to Newburyport, passing the Pawtucket falls through a canal and locks constructed for navigation purposes about the same time as the other Merrimack river canals but by different parties, who subsequently (in 1821) sold out to the Lowell manufacturing companies. Newburyport rafts usually consisted of ship-timber, masts, lumber, and wood; and, if starting from any place below Amoskeag falls, could be made into larger shots than those destined to pass through the Middlesex canal, because the Fawtucket canal locks were much larger.

The construction of these canals was a great enterprise in that day. Boston

was a town of only about twenty thousand inhabitants when the Middlesex canal was opened; neither Lowell nor Manchester had been commenced; Nashua was a small place, without manufacturing, and Concord was a country village.

Massachusetts granted in aid of the Middlesex canal two townships in Maine, of small value at that time, and but little was realized from them. Curiously enough, a very considerable portion of the money for the enterprise was raised by lotteries. Notably so in the case of the Amoskeag canal, the projectors of which were at several different times authorized by the