Street
Paving in North Manchester
Began Summer of 1903
The project of paving Main
Street began in the summer of 1903. Ralph
Liggett told later that he, Roy Abbott and
Charles Girard of Liberty Mills community got
jobs working on the street. The pay was 15 cents
an hour, $1.00. for a ten hour day and that was
above average pay. Mr. Liggett recalled that
they boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Phillips
for $1.75 a week and Mrs. Phillips put up
lunches for them because it was too far to walk
for lunch to the Phillips home at the East end
of College Avenue. All the labor on the street
was done by hand, shoveling, mixing concrete,
etc., and the grading, material hauling and such
was done with horse or mule teams. It was
customary then for a man and team to be paid
double the wage paid for a man, so the going
wage was $3. a day for man and team.
Main and the one block of
Walnut were the first streets paved in North
Manchester and the brick stood the test of time
better than any street or road surface built
until near the end of the 1900s. Seemingly the
brick withstood the weight of vehicles with
little wear as the section of Walnut Street
remained smooth and showed comparatively little
wear after 63 years when the last block of brick
pavement was covered with hot-mix asphalt on
June 24, 1966, The brick pavement on Main Street
between Mill and Beckley Streets was surfaced
with blacktop shortly after World War II and was
resurfaced before 1966.
When Main and Walnut Streets
were paved the town board also required that
sidewalks be built out to the curb to replace
the old wooden sidewalks. That was part of the
paving contract. The old hitching racks also
disappeared from the business section. A lot for
hitching horses was provided on the vacant lot,
the former site of the old Bee Hive later the
site of Harting Furniture on the south side of
Main Street east of the Legion. When business
buildings were later built on the site, livery
stables and so-called tie barns did a lively
business for a few years until the Horseless
carriage superseded the horse drawn vehicles.
It was a major step forward
from the dusty highway of Main Street in summers
and the mud and ruts of winter and spring.
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