Preservation Advocacy, Historic Mills, and LEGOs

We spent two enlightening days last Thursday and Friday at a mini-conference with statewide preservation advocacy colleagues from MA, NH, VT, ME, CT, and PA in Manchester, NH.

Thankfully, all of the presidential candidates were elsewhere, so we had time to take in a few sights in a chaos-free environment. A definite highlight was the LEGO Millyard Project in the SEE Science Center, located in a former mill building. This is the largest permanent LEGO installation at minifigure scale in the world, using over 3 million LEGO bricks. The model represents Manchester's Amoskeag Millyard as it might have looked circa 1900. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was commonly recognized as the largest textile manufacturer in the world by 1915.