The Banks Are Generally Steep And High, With A Narrow
Interval Reaching Back To The Hills, Which Is Only Rarely Or
Partially Overflown At Present, And Is Much Valued By The
Farmers.
Between Chelmsford and Concord, in New Hampshire, it
varies from twenty to seventy-five rods in width.
It is probably
wider than it was formerly, in many places, owing to the trees
having been cut down, and the consequent wasting away of its
banks. The influence of the Pawtucket Dam is felt as far up as
Cromwell's Falls, and many think that the banks are being abraded
and the river filled up again by this cause. Like all our
rivers, it is liable to freshets, and the Pemigewasset has been
known to rise twenty-five feet in a few hours. It is navigable
for vessels of burden about twenty miles; for canal-boats, by
means of locks, as far as Concord in New Hampshire, about
seventy-five miles from its mouth; and for smaller boats to
Plymouth, one hundred and thirteen miles. A small steamboat once
plied between Lowell and Nashua, before the railroad was built,
and one now runs from Newburyport to Haverhill.
Unfitted to some extent for the purposes of commerce by the
sand-bar at its mouth, see how this river was devoted from the
first to the service of manufactures. Issuing from the iron
region of Franconia, and flowing through still uncut forests, by
inexhaustible ledges of granite, with Squam, and Winnipiseogee,
and Newfound, and Massabesic Lakes for its mill-ponds, it falls
over a succession of natural dams, where it has been offering its
_privileges_ in vain for ages, until at last the Yankee race came
to _improve_ them.
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