150 Years of Opportunity

How Nashua rose from a small Colonial mill village to a prosperous center of the industrial Revolution, manufacturing textiles and other goods, is a story of pluck and endurance. That the city was able to rise rapidly from the ash heap of despair when the textile mills went bust in the late 1940s, however, is unique. It's also indicative of a kind of spirit that has kept this community just a bit ahead of the game through most of its history.

It was Nashua that had New Hampshire's first great building boom - beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing well into the late 1980s.

It was Nashua, and its surrounding communities, that attracted the young, upwardly mobile professionals who staffed the high-tech companies and service firms of a legendary strip of highway known as Route 128, just across the border in Massachusetts. And it is the Greater Nashua area where these young professionals began to create businesses or to find work as the information and service revolution grew and spread across the border.

Nashua has long benefitted from its proximity to Boston. Early settlers who drifted north in the mid-1600s to cut out a living in the woods and rivers found it convenient to sell their goods in Boston and Lowell, and other easily accessible Bay State communities. But it's not wilderness log cabins that tell the tale of Nashua; it's the brick buildings, with rows of high windows, evenly spaced for several stories, lining the city's side streets.

There's no mistaking that these were once bustling knitting mills of another, albeit bittersweet, era.

Bitter because the work in these mills was long and hard. Dirty finger-nail hard. Kids and women worked in them alongside fathers and brothers, from six in the morning until seven at night or later

Sweet because as hard and as hazardous and as dirty as it was, the work these mills provided offered a measure of prosperity and hope for a better life that the farms these people came from never could. But it would not last.

Actually, what happened in Nashua at that time was a great moment in New Hampshire history, that helped set the stage for what the city, and its surrounding communities, would become a quarter century later. At the time, however, things could not have looked worse. The story is a familiar one and plays like an old black-and white film noir, classic fare on cable movie channels.

Big mill closes. One third of a growing city's workforce 3,400 strong - thrown out of work as the last mill whistle blows just weeks before Christmas. The word "ghost town" is muttered in diners and over family dinner tables across the city.

Within hours of the news that the Textron mill is closing, the Chamber of Commerce holds an emergency meeting and the mayor appoints a special committee to deal with the crisis. The not for profit Nashua, New Hampshire Foundation was formed, charged with buying the vacant mills, managing the properties, and filling them with new industry as quickly as possible. The foundation's efforts were so successful that the 10-year, half million dollar mortgage that Textron held on the mill buildings and equipment was paid off in less than a year and a half.

Nashua's rebound was duly reported in the national press. Pageant Magazine called Nashua "the town that refused to die." Wrote Business Week: "Before Textron pulled out, Nashua was essentially a one-industry town - highly vulnerable to one-industry fluctuations. Now.. Nashua has what it believes is depression-proof diversification."

With the mills filled with a variety of new industries, the prosperous Eisenhower years of the 1950s blossomed into the growth years of the 1960s. With this era came companies like Sanders Associates with government contracts in the millions, soon to become the states largest employer. Then the giant Anheuser-Busch brewery in nearby Merrimack was built, near another premier employer, Kollsman Instruments. One of the foundation's early comers, Edgcomb Steel, loomed beside Route 93, just a mile from the Federal Aviation Administration's Air Traffic Control Center.

With these large companies, and the dozens of smaller ones that followed, came the need for housing developments and malls. The farmland and woods that surrounded Nashua soon became home to thousands of new residents.

In 1987, Money Magazine took note of the city's longterm stability by naming Nashua the number one place in the country in which to live and raise a family, due to its low unemployment and generally high quality of life. Although the following 10 years were rough ones, with the real estate crash that decimated most of the Northeast, the bank failures and corporate downsizing of such major local employers as Digital Equipment Corporation, Raytheon, and dozens of others, the city that wouldn't die, once again didn't.

In June of 1997, Money Magazine once again named Nashua the best place in the United States in which to live. As Forbes magazine noted in a 1987 piece on Nashua's remarkable comeback from those dark days of 1948: "With textiles long gone, Nashua is a booming high tech town. The children of low-paid textile workers are well paid engineers and technicians."