Pawtucket Falls - Lowell, Massachusetts

from "Thoreau's Vacation" by Joseph J. Thorndike Jr. (American Heritage - June/July 1983)

"To the Pawtucket Falls the Indians came each spring to spear the salmon as they swam upriver to spawn, and there they planted their gardens of beans and squash and corn for the summer. There the first white colonists came to trade with the Indians for furs and later to convert them to Christianity, and later still to take their lands. There, finally, a party of Boston businessmen came in 1821 to build a textile mill that would get its power from the falls. The Indians’ campground of Wamesit, beside the falls, became Lowell, the first great factory city in the United States."