The Wood Worsted Mill on Merrimack Street, 2005. Photo: Marc N. Belanger, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the spring of 1906, a building opened on the banks of the Merrimack that people in Lawrence could hardly believe. Some locals called it the "eighth wonder of the world." It was the Wood Worsted Mill, and the buildings you work in today are part of it.

The mill was the vision of William M. Wood, president of the American Woolen Company. Wood had worked his way up from poverty through the mill ranks. By the early 1900s he ran the largest woolen manufacturer in the world, and he wanted one mill big enough to spin yarn for the entire company.

A mill on a scale no one had seen

What he built was enormous. The complex covered almost 30 acres and stretched nearly a third of a mile along the river. When it opened in April 1906, it employed about 7,000 workers. It was designed by the Boston engineering firm of Charles T. Main, with long rows of tall windows to flood the work floors with daylight.

The scale is still hard to picture. The mill could spin the fleece of 600,000 sheep in just five hours. Even that wasn't enough for Wood. In 1909 he began the Ayer Mill across Union Street, named for his father-in-law, Frederick Ayer. The two mills were joined by an underground tunnel. The Ayer Mill's clock tower, whose faces are only about six inches smaller than Big Ben's, still keeps time over Lawrence.

Still standing

The Wood Mill was later reduced to about half its original size, and the textile industry left Lawrence in the 1950s. But the brick and the big windows stayed. In 2010 the Wood Worsted Mill was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2019 the restored Wood Worsted Mill building, which runs from One Union Street to 280 Merrimack, won a Preservation Massachusetts award.

Today those same daylight-filled floors hold offices, medical practices, restaurants and apartments. Next time you look up at the windows from Merrimack Street, you're looking at the building that once amazed a whole city.

Read more of the Riverwalk story or book a tour to see the mill for yourself.