Manchester

Manchester is a city in southern New Hampshire, on the Merrimack River at the Amoskeag Falls. It was named in 1810 after Manchester in England, in the hope that the falls would turn it into a city of mills like its namesake.

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company built a row of brick mills along the river from the 1830s, with canals carrying water from the falls to their wheels. The mills drew workers from rural New England and later from Quebec, Ireland, Greece and Poland, and they made cotton cloth and fire engines. Manchester received its city charter in 1846, and the company built rows of brick housing for its workers beside the mills. The company closed in the 1930s, and the long row of the Millyard was later filled with offices, schools and tech firms.

DEKA Research and Development, founded by the inventor Dean Kamen, designs medical devices in the Millyard, where Kamen also developed the Segway. FIRST, the robotics competition for students that Kamen started, also has its headquarters in the city. Southern New Hampshire University, based in Manchester, runs online degree programs for students across the country.

The Currier Museum of Art holds European and American paintings and owns the Zimmerman House, a home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s. The SEE Science Center, in a former mill, keeps a large model of the Millyard built from LEGO bricks. The New Hampshire Fisher Cats play minor league baseball at a ballpark on the riverbank as a farm team of the Toronto Blue Jays.