The Merrimack Before Industrialization

Prior to the mass-colonization of their homelands by the English in the early 1600s, the Pennacook cultivated land to provide their main source of food. In the spring, they planted large gardens of squash, beans, and corn on their land near the waterfalls in present-day Lowell. They also fished for salmon, shad, eels, and sturgeon. In the summer, they traveled downriver to present-day Newburyport, where they caught ocean fish and shellfish. In the fall, they harvested their vegetables, gathered nuts and fruit, and hunted deer and other animals. In winter, when they moved further inland away from the river to protect themselves from the cold winds off the water, they lived on a diet of smoked meats and dried vegetables.

For hundreds of years, before and after colonization, fish was an incredibly important food source to the Pennacook and other tribes living in the Merrimack Valley. At the waterfall now referred to as Pawtucket Falls, native people from across the region gathered during salmon runs in the spring to catch fish, which they preserved and stored for winter.

This 1585 drawing shows a group of Algonquian people fishing near the Virginia colony. The Pennacook used the similar tools and techniques for fishing. From their dugout canoes, they used spears to catch fish. In the background of the picture, men check their weirs, the large wooden traps used to catch fish moving upstream.

Following the violence against and killing or forced displacement of indigenous people by English settler-colonists during Metacom's War (King Philip's War), few Pennacook remained in the area, which the settler-colonists noted as the Pennacook "abandoning" their homeland. In 1686, several residents of Chelmsford "purchased" the title to Wamesit, the area now known as downtown Lowell, and the surrounding lands.

The English settler-colonists established farms and even a sawmill and fulling mill (for felting wool cloth) along the Merrimack and Concord rivers in a community that become known as East Chelmsford. The river was a source of water for irrigation and fish for food, a way to transport goods to seaports on the coast, and a power source for small mills.

This 1821 map shows the location of family farms along the Merrimack River in what is now the city of Lowell.