Manchester, NH Summary

With more than 102,000 residents, this southern New Hampshire city astride the Merrimack River is the state’s largest.

During presidential election season, when New Hampshire holds the nation’s first primary election, the city seems like the center of US politics as presidential hopefuls “press the flesh.” Manchester evolved from an eighteenth-century fishing and lumbering town to a nineteenthcentury center for water-powered textile manufacturing. Incorporated as Derryfield in 1751, it was renamed after Manchester, England, in 1810, when cotton mills began churning out cloth.

The factories eventually covered more than 8 million square feet, stretched for 1 mile, and shipped nearly 5 million yards of cloth a week. The Amoskeag Mills, chartered in 1831, were once the largest in the world. The last of the mills shut down in 1935, the victim of cheaper labor in the South and aging equipment.

The city is now New Hampshire’s industrial, financial, and commercial hub, and home to four colleges, a campus of the University of New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and a junior college. The Currier Gallery of Art houses European and American pieces from the thirteenth century to the present.

Manchester can be reached on a number of highways, including I-93. The city has its own airport and is served by several bus lines.