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Manchester, New Hampshire was a planned industrial city from its inception, modeled deliberately on Lowell, Massachusetts when it was incorporated in 1846. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company built what became the largest cotton textile operation in the world here, a mile-long complex of red-brick mill buildings along the Merrimack River that employed 17,000 workers at its peak. French-Canadian immigrants made up nearly 40 percent of the workforce, and the neighborhoods they built on the west side of the river, with their Catholic churches and Franco-American social clubs, still carry traces of that community.

Amoskeag declared bankruptcy in 1935 as the textile industry moved south, and Manchester spent the following decades figuring out what to do with a mile of empty mill buildings.

The answer, arrived at gradually from the 1970s onward, was to divide them into offices, apartments, restaurants, galleries, and technology companies. The Millyard, as the complex is now known, is one of the most successful adaptive reuse projects in the northeastern United States, and the Millyard Museum inside Mill No. 3 tells the full story from Penacook Abenaki settlement to the present.