The first cotton spinning factory in New Hampshire, and among the earliest in the country, was established in New Ipswich in 1803.
Constructed along the banks of the Souhegan River, the mill employed such technological innovations as the water spinning frame to generate hundreds of pounds of cotton yarn weekly, which was then farmed out to local women to weave into cloth.
Factories would begin to use power looms in the 1820s to weave their own cloth, but the success of the New Ipswich mill, initiated what became known as “cotton mill fever,” leading to the construction of such textile giants as the Amoskeag mills in Manchester.
N.H. Historical Society