A churning curtain of white water spills over the great stone weir of the Merrimac River Dam at Lawrence, Massachusetts — a city literally built on water power, whose roaring mills once clothed a nation. This hand-colored pre-linen card captures the dam's full dramatic breadth, with a handsome iron truss bridge anchoring the right edge and a skyline of brick mill stacks exhaling smoke into a pastel sky. Lawrence's Great Stone Dam, completed in 1848, was an engineering marvel of its age, stretching 900 feet across the Merrimac and powering some of the largest textile mills in the world. The card was never mailed and retains crisp, unfaded color — a pristine snapshot of industrial New England at its peak.