Origin
The Nashua Manufacturing Company received a charter in the 1820s to make cloth and to trade near the Nashua River. Three miles from where the company's mills were being built, a dam was constructed at Mine Falls. A power canal was hand-dug under the supervision of James Baldwin. His idea was to change the course of the water from the river, through the guard gates, and into the canal. By the time the water reached the mills, it had enough velocity to turn the waterwheels under the building.
The gatehouse was constructed in 1886 during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. At the time it was a state-of-the-art improvement over the smaller gates that once occupied the canal. A Lowell, Massachusetts contractor, L.F. Kittrege, hired men to build five new lift gates that would be protected by the brick walls of the gatehouse.
The gatehouse, along with the dam and canal, is a part of the Nashua Manufacturing Company Historic District; they are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The gatehouse was built for practicality, not architectural refinement. Its interior contains the machinery that reflects the transition from hydro power to electric power.
Read more about this topic: 1886 Mine Falls Gatehouse
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Each structure and institution here was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)