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Tangents are nice!
Here's a bit about the city I've shown some pictures of.
Haverhill was started as small village called Pentucket located on the falls of the Little River where it empties into the Merrimack River. The land was purchased from the Pentucket Indians in 1642 for 10 pounds, 3 shillings. The area was known for its clay and the initial industries made bricks and pottery. As time went on there were lumber mills, and then eventually textile mills and shoes. The city grew up quickly and by the latter part of the 19th-century, the shoe industry boomed, and this became the mainstay. The city grew up rapidly with the industrial base, and by the 20th century was one of the larger cities in the Merrimack Valley, if not the 3rd largest.
Town of Bradford, MA located across the river from Haverhill was once part of Rowley along with Georgetown, Newbury, West Newbury, and Amesbury, as well as a few in southern New Hampshire. This area was too big for Colonial government so the town was divvied up into the smaller communities. Bradford had very little industry and became a bedroom community associated with Haverhill across the river. In the 1890s, Haverhill annexed Bradford, however, the smaller more residential area kept its distinct look, which it still has today. Groveland, located across the Merrimack on the Bradford side, was actually once part of Bradford, however, that was deemed to big and split up in the mid 19th-century.
Over time the area grew larger with the mills going gang busters, however, the boom lasted to just after WWII and things started to decline, just like it did for many areas in the region. By the 1960s, the mills were closing, and by 1971 the last of the shoe factories closed. During this time urban renewal came along and many, many famous buildings and lots of houses, like the ones shown in the pictures, were wiped out. One-by-one, the buildings came down along Merrimack Street, and Main Street. The big old Federalist and Georgian brick storefronts and false-front 19th-century commercial buildings gave way to the wrecking ball. The big Victorian mansions along Main Street, the ones built by the shoe factory owners, also fell to the wrecking ball along with the movie theaters which once stretched up Main Street. The process was stopped when the demolition company was about to knock down the famous Haverhill high school - the one that is depicted in the Archie comic strip because the author being a Haverhill native used this as the base for his characters. It turned out the demolition company had some "friends" on the city council and paid some kickbacks to receive the contract to remove the buildings. Sadly, though, we lost our big train station, the old city hall, and other famous landmarks before the damage was done. Today we have great swaths of parking lots.
The old empty shoe factories remained with many disappearing to the wrecking ball as arson and other urban renewal projects came along. Eventually in the early 1980s, the remaining mills were converted to loft apartments, condominiums, and for light industry use, however, the latter never caught on.
Today, the city has stabilized, but the demographics have changed. What was once an industrial city, is now a commuter city with people working outside the area. The downtown, what remains of it, competes with nearby sales tax-free New Hampshire, and has very little retail since there is no one to shop during the week, and those that do shop go to the malls in New Hampshire anyway. What remains of the retail business is mostly night clubs, bars, banks, restaurants, law offices, rehabilitation clinics, and small antique stores.
So this is the area from whence the pics came from, and is very typical of lots of the Merrimack Valley, though more so in Haverhill than anywhere else. I remember the downtown in the early 1960s before many of the buildings came down even though I was quite young. So much is gone today...
Anyway, there were quite a number of famous people from Haverhill. Among them:
Dr. Frank Lahey, the found of the Lahey Clinic.
R.H. Macey - He couldn't get a loan to expand his dry goods store so he left for New York City.
Louis B. Mayer - one of the founders of MGM. Dido as above. He had his first movie production theater here, and couldn't get the local banks to invest so he moved out too.
Alexander Graham Bell had investors from Haverhill, and early Western Electric built and installed the first telephone interchange equipment here.
Tom Bergeron - TV host of America's Funniest Videos was born here, and now hosts a local TV program on our AM station WHAV.
www.whav.net
Bob Montana - the comic strip artist who created the famous Archie comic strip.
and many more.
John
