Mike Harrold, a notoriously productive and curious member ACM’s industrial survey team, wondered where the hundreds of workers employed in Amesbury’s booming textile mills went when their long factory shifts ended. But a careful look at 1885 insurance maps provided an answer. On one of those old maps, he found an intriguing area labeled “Hamilton Woolen Company’s Tenements” at the bottom of Mill, Currier and Aubin streets.

Today that area is an attractive neighborhood of mostly single-family homes, but 130 years ago it was something quite different: a crowded community of factory row-houses squeezed into an area now occupied by only about 30 houses. About 120 apartments stood side-by-side here, in wood-frame row houses, each row house typically containing between five and ten apartments. These units were built as worker residences by the textile mill owners, who owned the land and the buildings, and rented the apartments to their workers who needed a place to live.

Mike was also able to recognize this row housing, mostly simple one or two story gable-roof buildings, in fuzzy photographs from the same period. They’re visible, too, on three-dimensional “birds-eye-view” maps of the time, built right on the edges of the streets.

Imagine a typical day on these streets during the late 1800s. At a certain time each day, probably before dawn, workers must have been streaming out of these apartments, walking up Mill Street and Aubin Street, heading for their long shifts at the millyard factories. Soon after that procession ended, other workers, weary after just ending their shifts, began to come back home, down the hill to the rowhouses. It must have been like the tide, ebbing and flowing on a preset schedule you could use to set your watch.

Except for the insurance maps and a few old photos, little remains of these row houses today. But Mike was able to find one still standing on Aubin Street. It’s now a well maintained multi-family house, but it seems to retain its footprint and shape from the 1880s. For more details about these houses and the one that remains, click here to view Mike’s report, “Last of the Textile Mill Rowhouses,” published recently on the ACM website.

Mike’s report might cause you to wonder what it was like to live in these factory houses in a crowded neighborhood 130 years ago. For the ACM industrial survey team, researching that social story could be an exciting project for the future. If you’d like to help or if you know something about people or families who might have lived in these row houses – maybe one of your ancestors – please click here to email the Amesbury Carriage Museum.