Editing Lewiston, Maine (section)

===Textile investment===

[[File:Birds-eye View of Mills & Canal, Lewiston, ME.jpg|thumb|right|[[Bates Mill]] and canal {{circa|1915}}]]

After World War I, profits from the textile industry in New England mill towns such as Lewiston; [[Biddeford, Maine|Biddeford]]; [[Manchester, New Hampshire]]; [[Waterbury, Connecticut]]; and [[Fall River, Massachusetts|Fall River]], [[Haverhill, Massachusetts|Haverhill]], [[Lawrence, Massachusetts|Lawrence]] and [[Lowell, Massachusetts]] began to decline. Businesses began moving to the [[Southern United States|South]] due to lower costs of power from more modern technologies (Lewiston's [[water wheel]] technology gave way to [[hydroelectricity]], cheaper transportation—as most cotton and materials came from the South—and cheaper labor).

Starting in the late 1950s, many of Lewiston's textile mills began closing. This gradually led to a run-down and abandoned downtown area. Chain stores located downtown—[[F. W. Woolworth Company|Woolworth's]], [[W. T. Grant]], [[S. S. Kresge]], [[JC Penney]] and [[Sears Roebuck]]—shut their doors or moved to malls on the outskirts of Lewiston or Auburn. The city's flagship department store, the four-story B. Peck & Co., closed in 1982 after more than a century in business. As businesses and jobs began to leave the city, people followed. The population stopped increasing at its previous rate and began to slowly decline after 1970, then at a greater rate in the 1990s.<ref name="ci.lewiston.me.us">{{Cite web|url=http://www.ci.lewiston.me.us/history/|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20070619020331/http://ci.lewiston.me.us/history/|url-status=dead|title=History of Lewiston, Maine (municipal site)|archivedate=June 19, 2007}}</ref>