Recreating a Lost Amesbury Landscape

The Railroad Avenue area of Amesbury around 1890, looking east from Chestnut Street along the railroad tracks towards Water Street. The railroad shed and large factory buildings in the foreground were removed long ago, but Mill 4 on Water Street is visible left of center and the Market Street Baptist Church is clearly distinguishable in the upper right. This area is now home to Nichols scrap yard, Costello Transportation Center and German AutoSport service center. Click to enlarge. (Photo courtesy of Amesbury Public Library, Local History Collection.)

Mike Harrold of the ACM Industrial Survey Team recently published another of his amazing research reports. This one takes us back 170 years to the area at the end of Railroad Avenue and bounded by Elm Street, Back River and Chestnut Street – now occupied mostly by the Nichols scrap yard, Costello Transportation Center and German AutoSport service center. The area once held a busy rail yard, the terminus for rail traffic connecting Amesbury to the rest of the U.S.A. Close by the tracks were also mills, factories, warehouses and a rail passenger station.

Today, that landscape looks almost nothing like it did in the late 1800s, so Mike shows us how the area developed, starting shortly after the arrival of the railroad in 1848. At that time, it was largely low, open space. Extending the railroad to Water Street, close to the textile mill activity in the lower and upper millyards, required building a trestle (bridge) over Back River. That railroad trestle connected this formerly isolated parcel to Water Street and the millyards. Eventually, this land was developed by carriage manufacturers and other industries eager for access to railroad transport.

While little of this industrial development remains today, some features of that era, such as the railroad berm, are still visible if you know what to look for. Mike has cleverly superimposed building outlines on recent photographs of the area, giving us a way to visualize how this small section of Amesbury looked when Amesbury’s textile, carriage and auto body industries made the town a true industrial center.

Click here to read “Envisioning Railroad Avenue Development.”