For 150 years, a cluster of red brick mill buildings on the Chicopee River served as the community's industrial anchor. The complex was conceived, designed, and built by the Boston Associates, who in 1831 secured the water rights with an initial investment of $90,000 by creating the Springfield Canal Company to tap the river for power sources, with engineer John Chase chosen as the company's agent. Immigrant Irish laborers who had just completed construction of New York's Erie Canal came to Chicopee, and on April 1, 1832, Chase's work force began building a dam, canal, and mill buildings; water entered the canal on December 8, 1832. In the next decade, the Boston Associates invested $1.5 million, and the one-third-mile canal powered three textile mills: the Cabot Manufacturing Company, established in 1832, followed by the Perkins Mills in 1836 and the Dwight Manufacturing Company in 1841; in 1856, the three companies merged under the Dwight Manufacturing Company name. Encouraged by industrialist Edmund Dwight, Nathan Peabody Ames and James Tyler Ames moved their Chelmsford, Massachusetts, tool and cutlery business to Chicopee Falls in 1834 and that year received a government order for 1,000 naval sabers for the Ames Sword Company; before long, the company on the Chicopee River gained an international reputation for manufacturing swords, cannons, and advanced military hardware, and Civil War historians called the Ames Manufacturing Company "Lincoln's Arsenal." In the Ames factory complex in 1883, A.H. Overman built his first Victor Bicycles, and ten years later two young employees, Charles and Frank Duryea, built and drove the first successful American car propelled by an internal combustion engine. In 1904, A.G. Spaulding and Bros., the sporting goods manufacturer, moved into the Ames buildings on the canal, and the facility grew into the nation's largest maker of recreational sporting goods.