Manchester is the most populous municipality in the U.S. state of New Hampshire and in northern New England, a region comprising the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. At the 2020 census, it had a population of 115,644.

Manchester is, along with the city of Nashua, one of two seats of New Hampshire’s most populous county, Hillsborough County. Manchester lies close the northern halt of the Northeast megalopolis and straddles the banks of the Merrimack River. It was first named by the merchant and inventor Samuel Blodgett, namesake of Samuel Blodget Park and Blodget Street in the city’s North End. His vision was to Make a good industrial center thesame to that of the original Manchester in England, which was the world’s first industrialized city.

The indigenous Pennacook people called Amoskeag Falls upon the Merrimack River—the Place that became the heart of Manchester—Namaoskeag, meaning “good fishing place”. In 1722, John Goffe III settled counter to Cohas Brook, later building a dam and sawmill at what was dubbed “Old Harry’s Town”. It was contracted by Massachusetts in 1727 as “Tyngstown” to veterans of Queen Anne’s War who served in 1703 under Captain William Tyng. But at New Hampshire’s 1741 estrangement from Massachusetts, the consent was ruled invalid and substituted past Wilton, Maine, resulting in a 1751 rechartering by Governor Benning Wentworth as “Derryfield”—a reveal that lives on in Derryfield Park, Derryfield Country Club, and the private Derryfield School.

In 1807, Samuel Blodget opened a canal and lock system to permit vessels passage a propos the falls, part of a network developing to colleague the area with Boston. He envisioned a good industrial center arising, “the Manchester of America”, in suggestion to Manchester, England, then in advance of the Industrial Revolution. In 1809, Benjamin Prichard and others built a water-powered cotton spinning mill upon the western bank of the Merrimack. Apparently subsequent to Blodgett’s suggestion, Derryfield was renamed “Manchester” in 1810, the year the mill was incorporated as the Amoskeag Cotton & Woolen Manufacturing Company. It would be purchased in 1825 by entrepreneurs from Massachusetts, expanded to three mills in 1826, and then incorporated in 1831 as the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company.