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The Middlesex Canal
This page is an attempt to provide a focal point for information about the old Middlesex Canal which ran from Lowell, Massachusetts to Boston during the first half of the nineteenth century. ( The water link actually extended beyond Lowell to Concord , N.H. with the addition of a series of bypass canals around the rapids and falls on the Merrimack River in New Hampshire.) Construction on the Middlesex Canal was started in October of 1794 and was completed on schedule on December 31, 1803. The canal started at the Merrimack River in Lowell and ran to the Mill Pond in Charlestown, a distance of twenty-seven miles. For the next forty years, the canal represented the most economical means of transporting goods between Lowell and Boston and was directly responsible for the development of Lowell as the first industrial city in Massachusetts. With the completion of bypass canals around the falls and rapids of the Merrimack River in New Hampshire in 1815 the usable route was extended to include Concord, New Hampshire. It wasn't until the early 1840s, with the Lowell railroad's hav- ing opened alongside the canal route, that the use of the canal had diminished to the point where toll income wasn't sufficient to meet the costs of maintenance and repair. In the early 1850s the proprietors disolved the canal corporation. ( An interesting note is that the canal, whose driving force was Loammi Baldwin, was put out of business by the Lowell railroad whose construction was supervised in part by his two sons, Loammi Baldwin Jr. and James F. Baldwin ).
