Historian Grace Holbrook Blood wrote in her 1948 book “Manchester on the Merrimack”: “On October 24, 1838 the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company held the first of its famous land sales, and the enthusiastic public response might well have been regarded as prophetic of the rapid and almost phenomenal development about to take place as the little community mushroomed into a city.”

After the Amoskeag was incorporated in 1831, the company acquired more than 15,000 acres of land stretching eastward from the Merrimack River. The company's plan was to shift the center of town from its original location on what is now Mammoth Road to an area close to the new mills that would line the riverbank. In 1838, Elm Street and the central part of the new city were laid out and 147 lots sold. Houses and business blocks were built, and the Manchester House hotel was constructed on the corner of Elm and Merrimack streets. In the summer of 1839 hundreds of people moved to Manchester to take advantage of work and housing opportunities.

Another land sale took place Oct. 8, 1939, and the pace of construction accelerated. The overwhelming influx of outsiders alarmed the townspeople. As Blood wrote, “It is not surprising to find that the astonishing progress beside the river had met with distrust and hostility in some quarters, and that bitter discord had arisen between the new and the old.”

At the town meeting of March 1839 the locals still prevailed, and town affairs were handled as usual. After the October land sale, according to historian George Waldo Browne, “The necessity for a different order of things was apparent to everyone.” The town leaders suddenly had to face the fact that they had to begin building a new city nearly from scratch.

The selectmen called a special town meeting for Oct. 26. The gathered citizens voted to establish “a system of police,” to create fire wards and to buy firefighting equipment. The possible spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox and diphtheria was of concern, so three health officers were elected. To enable the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company to extend its grid-system street layout beyond the central part of the new downtown, the residents voted to allow the discontinuation of four existing public highways. In the minutes of the meeting the current downtown section of Manchester was referred to as the “New Village” to differentiate it from the original center of town, which was known as “Manchester Center.”

There was already one fire engine in town, owned by the Stark Manufacturing Company. The fire wardens worked quickly to purchase a new engine that would be under town control. This was the Merrimack No. 1, a hand tub made by the Hunneman Company in Boston. (This machine still exists and is owned by the town of Bennington). The town built a small firehouse on the corner of Market and Franklin streets to house the new equipment. On Nov. 28, the selectmen appointed Manchester's first police officers, Hiram Brown, Nehemiah Chase, James Wallace and J.T.P. Hunt.

With these bold first steps, the townspeople, influenced by the newcomers, began moving Manchester into a new and expanded realm of existence. Despite initial progress, there was an undercurrent of dissent among the original inhabitants. This conflict would come to a head at the town meeting of March 1840. During this meeting Justice John Stark (descendant of General John Stark of Revolutionary War fame) summed up the prevalent sentiment among the old-timers, “Who are you that are here to act and to tread upon us in this manner? …you're a set of interlopers who have come here to get a living upon a sand bank. And a damned poor living you'll get, let me tell you!”

But, the wealthy Boston financiers who were bankrolling the development in Manchester had already proven their ability to reap profit from large-scale textile production in the rapidly growing city of Lowell, Mass. There appeared to be no limit to what they could do with the tremendous water power of Amoskeag Falls, and with their near total control of undeveloped acreage big enough to hold the prosperous city of their imaginations.

Next week: The contentious town meeting of 1840.

Aurore Eaton is the executive director of the Manchester Historic Association. She can be reached at aeaton@manchesterhistoric.org.