Photo: William Madison Wood, c. 1916, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The man whose name is still attached to Riverwalk's history started with almost nothing.

William Madison Wood was born on June 18, 1858, in a cottage on Pease's Point Way in Edgartown, on Martha's Vineyard. His parents were Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. His father crewed on a New Bedford whaling ship. When William was 12, his father died, and the boy left school to support his mother and younger siblings. He found work as an office boy in a mill.

He learned fast. In 1886, he met Frederick Ayer, a wealthy businessman, while trying to sell shares in a mill he hoped to build. Ayer didn't invest. Instead, he hired Wood to help run his own mill in Lawrence. Two years later, in 1888, Wood married Ayer's daughter, Ellen.

In 1899, Ayer led the merger of eight struggling textile companies into the American Woolen Company, and Wood took the helm. He became known as a turnaround expert, the man owners called when a mill was failing. In 1906 he opened the mill that carried his name, the Wood Worsted Mill, then the largest mill in the world. By the 1920s, American Woolen ran about 60 mills across New England and controlled roughly a fifth of the country's woolen production.

Wood was also the man the 1912 strikers were striking against. During the strike he was charged in connection with a plot to plant dynamite around Lawrence; a jury found him not guilty on June 6, 1913. Organized labor never forgave him.

Later he built Shawsheen Village in Andover, a planned company town and headquarters, between 1906 and 1924. He even owned a soccer team, the Shawsheen Indians, which won the 1924–25 National Challenge Cup. He died on February 2, 1926, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

His mill outlived him by a century, and it is still standing on the Merrimack.

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