[1] In the early 20th century, changing economic and social conditions occurred as the New England textile industry shifted to the Southern U.S., and the business went bankrupt in 1935.

Many decades later, the original mills were refurbished and renovated, and now house offices, restaurants, software companies, college branches, art studios, apartments and a museum.

[1] The Amoskeag millyard complex was considered "one of the most remarkable manifestations of our urban and industrial culture by New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her December 22, 1968 article Manchester, NH: Lessons in Urbicide.

His enterprise allowed boats traveling between Concord and Nashua to bypass Amoskeag Falls, opening the region to development and connecting it to a network linking it to Boston.

He and three brothers—Ephraim, David and Robert Stevens—had purchased land and water power rights the year before on the west bank of the Merrimack near Amoskeag Bridge, where they built a mill.

Weaving became a cottage industry for local women, who earned between 2 and 7 cents per yard, depending on the type of fabric.

In 1822, Olney Robinson of Rhode Island purchased the company, using money and equipment borrowed from Samuel Slater and Larned Pitcher.

Slater and Pitcher then sold three-fifths of the company in 1825 to Dr. Oliver Dean, Lyman Tiffany and Willard Sayles of Massachusetts.

Offices were established in Boston, where the treasurer de facto ran the firm, with an agent (manager) in Manchester to oversee personnel and operation of the mills.

Freight cars ran on spurs beside the mills to supply raw materials, particularly cotton from southern states, then carried away finished fabrics to markets around the country.

Incorporated in 1846, Manchester was intended to be a model of utopian factory-city planning, as Lowell, Massachusetts - thirty miles down-river - had been.

It had broad avenues and squares ("reserved for public promenades") graced by fine schools, churches, hospitals, fire stations and a library.

Row houses (called corporations) were built and rented to workers with families after years on a waiting list.

The city's main thoroughfare, Elm Street, ran atop a ridge parallel to the mills below, but at a remove to lessen their clamor.

The company, worried about labor movements within the company in the wake of the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, attempted to prevent unionizing activities and promoted the "Americanization" of the workforce through benevolence activities and the construction of Textile Field (now Gill Stadium) in 1913.

When tower bells rang at the end of the day's one shift, thousands of employees changed from work clothes and swarmed out the iron gates.

The noise from thousands of looms running simultaneously in the weave rooms was deafening, so workers had to communicate by shouting in each other's ears or lip reading.

In an attempt to remain competitive, Amoskeag made the mistake of adding more mills and spindles to reduce the costs of making fabric, at a time when the textile industry had excess productive capacity.

Capital was thereby protected for owners of the holding company, at the expense of denying it to the mills to modernize and survive fluctuations in the business cycle.

By 1937, half the buildings were occupied by other businesses under the aegis of Amoskeag Industries, established in 1936 by local businessmen.

[8] The SEE Science Center houses a large permanent minifigure-scale Lego recreation of the Millyard, with approximately 8,000 minifigures and an estimated five million bricks.