New England's Late
19th-century Architecture

New England has water power. Great textile mills were built along the rivers, their looms driven by the swift currents.

The Federal style was adapted to industrial uses. You will see large, substantial, straightforward brick factories in the many "mill towns" such as Fall River, Lowell, and Marlboro, Massachusetts.

In Manchester, New Hampshire, the great Amoskeag mills march along the riverbank for almost half a mile.

The mills may have been Federal, but the mill owners wanted something fancier. As the 1800's wore on, they employed Henry Hobson Richardson, the firm of McKim, Mead and White, and other designers to build worldly fantasies: Egyptian temples, Renaissance palaces, Romanesque temples and Gothic churches.

Trinity Church, at Copley Square in Boston, is a fine example of the period. Newport, Rhode Island's elegant mansions—many of them actually small palaces—demonstrate how this late-century exuberance would end.

Among the "common people," exuberance led to Victorian gingerbread, some of the best of which survives in the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts.

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Colonial style

Georgian style

Federal Style

Greek Revival

Neoclassical style

20th-century Styles

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