my admiration of the scenery about Amoskeag Falls to this day, and I do not wonder that the Indians were attracted by its beauty and grandeur. I recall now soinething of the roads of Manchester at that time. There were perhaps only two or three principal roads in that part of Manchester which now constitutes our city as a city. In the other and further parts of the town there were roads about which I shall not speak, but the principal road was the River road, running from Hooksett along the line of the river down towards Nashua. Another road ran from the vicinity of the falls, through Manchester Centre, or what is now known as Hallsville, to old Londonderry, while another somewhat to the north, over the hills, reached the same point. The town was then a farming community. The people were mostly farmers, and the town itself was covered almost entirely with a dense growth of forest. Hardly any of the land on the road from Hooksett along the line of the river was more than a few rods in width between the river and the forest. The woods came down to within thirty or forty rods of the house in which General Stark lived, and along the entire distance, except in a few places there was only a small space between the forests and the Merrimack river. Of course about the Centre and older settled districts the tracts of cleared land were larger, but the town itself was mostly in those days covered with a heavy growth of wood and timber. I also remember among other things something about the bridges we had in those days. In the earlier times there was but one bridge across the Merrimack river at this point, and no other bridge between Hooksett and Nashua, so far as I now remember. That bridge finally went to ruin and was afterwards rebuilt, but I remember when it was in a dilapidated condition going across on the timbers, for much of the business of Manchester was done not in the town of Manchester, but in the vil lage of Piscataquog, called Squog for short. There were two or three stores over there, while there was only one very small one, or possibly two, on this side of the river, so the people of Manchester were accustomed to cross on this old bridge or by the ferry, which was in existence at that time, sometimes crossing just below what was McGregor bridge, and sometimes crossing by Merrill's Falls, but most of the transportation was done by boats because the bridge was not in a safe condition. I also remember well about the schools in those days. Manchester in very early times turned its attention to school matters. I am not able to give the dates in reference to the formation of the schools and many other matters as should be done in a historic lecture, but this is not of that character. It is only a little bit of a talk. I remember the little old school house at the Falls. There is a very fine picture of it in the history of Manchester as given by Judge Potter. I do not know but our Presdent made the picture. I presume he did. It gives a very correct idea of the school house, and that is the first place where I attended school when a boy four or five years of age. I remember the first school master that ever taught in that school when I went there, and that was the late Judge Aaron Whittemore of Pembroke, whom I looked upon as a cold, indifferent, and hard-hearted man, but whom I later found to be cordial and genial, a very friendly man and a very excellent teacher. There were three schools in the town at the time. Besides all this, it was a common thing to have instruction for the smaller children in private schools. I remember that two of these schools were held, one in the house of John Stark, and the other in the house of Mr. Kennedy, a little above the Reform School. The people of Manchester in their earlier days were imbued with the idea that knowledge was essential not only to children, but essential to people of larger growth, and I believe that this has been a characteristic of Manchester ever since, that it has been devoted to the purposes of education and the development of the human mind. I remember the locks and canals, and the canal that was built by Judge Blodget, although I do not know that I recall him. This enterprise was one quite remarkable in its character in those early times. We must remember in thinking of these things that it was long before the day of trolley cars, railroads and easy riding carriages with rubber tires on the wheels. In fact there was hardly anything but ox carts and carts made with the bodies resting upon solid axle trees of the cart itself, and so it was not an easy thing to ride in the carriages of that day. I also remember when the stone lock was built. As I recall now, at the point where the canal entered was a guard gate, or gate opening into a reservoir, and just below this gate and just at the lower extremity of this reservoir were two locks that were used for carrying through boats or rafts as the case might be, I will not now stop to describe these locks. Then there was a long canal extending nearly down to what is now the bridge across the river. From there, there were three locks that opened from the canal down into the river. In my early days, perhaps 1825, one of the locks gave out and they replaced it with a lock built entirely of stone, and it became a permanent structure. I remember very well the men who built the lock, indeed they occupied my father's house at the time, and we removed to a new house up the river. And this leads me to say just now in passing that at the time about which I am speaking, there were but ten houses in the whole of Manchester proper. I do not include the outskirts of the town, or the North End, or the South End, neither do I include Amoskeag or Squog, because these two villages were then, one in the town of Goffstown and the other in portions of Bedford. There may be some here who did not know that portions of Goffstown and Bedford were ever added to our city. I remember one little instance that occurred when I was only four or five years old, or six years of age at the most. Although a boy I was on very familiar terms with the men on the river, both boatinen and raftmen. My father's house was a boarding house, and my mother after becoming a widow, con tinued the house for the accommodation of the rivermen, whether boatmen or rafters, as they were called, and so I knew almost every boatman on the river. They usually stayed over night, or stopped at the house for dinner. During the time that goods were being carried by boats I remember that I was down at the locks one day to see what was being done, and I noticed quite a number of small packages. I called them little barrels in those days, and upon inquiry I found that they were packages of white lead. That was when white lead was first being used for painting houses. The merchants had bought these in Boston and were taking them up to Concord and other places for sale. I stooped down to lift up one of these packages and I was unable to do it; it was a little package weighing about twenty-five pounds, but I was unable to lift it because it was so heavy. There The rivermen call my attention now for a moment. were two classes of rivermen, the raftmen and the boatmen, and they were quite unlike in their character and in their habits. The raftmen came down once a year on their way to Boston or Newburyport, as the case might be. I need not describe the rafts as I presume they are familiar to you all. In going over the falls they were obliged to have, as they usually had, a competent man to pilot the raft. He was upon the rear part of the timber, and acted as captain of the raft. On the forward end oftentimes were two men for the purpose of changing the direction of the raft as it was moving. The man in the rear gave directions which way to pull their oars in order to clear the rocks. This gave employment to a class of men who lived here in the spring. They were called captains and oftentimes were employed by the men who owned the rafts to take them down as far as Litchfield. These men demanded pretty extravagant wages; some used to charge $2.00 or $3.00 for taking a raft from here to Litchfield. In those days, however, the means of communication were not very good, and the men returned with their oars on their shoulders, because they had no other means |