Facing a dramatic and rapid loss of industry, a new plan took shape to rebuild Nashua’s economy. Local leaders formed the Nashua New Hampshire Foundation and purchased the millions of square feet of empty textile mill buildings. They set about attracting new, diverse, and progressive industries to the "Gate City." Companies such as Nashua Plastics, Bagshaw Co., Sprague Electric, Doehla Greeting Cards, Edgecomb Steel, and most noteworthy Sanders Associates came to Nashua and grew. The old Nashua Gummed & Coated Paper Company reinvented itself as Nashua Corporation with new and advanced products. Instead of slowly dying from the loss of the textile mills, a nationally recognized rebirth of the City of Nashua emerged.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System connected Nashua with Concord to the north and Boston to the south. This unleashed a boom of real estate development, which reshaped Nashua with subdivision developments of single-family homes, new industrial parks and shopping centers. Nashua’s population exploded throughout the 1960’s and 70’s.
As more families came to reside in Nashua and Southern New Hampshire, large retail developments followed in their wake. Daniel Webster Highway South and Amherst Street were still country roads in the late 1960’s, but with the opening of the Nashua Mall in 1970, the Pheasant Lane Mall in 1986, and shopping plazas along Amherst Street, Nashua became an economic powerhouse as a regional tax-free retail shopping destination.
Nashua enters the 21st century with more promise and potential than at any time in its long and distinguished history. Nashua’s legacy as a community of innovation, advancement, experimentation, invention, enterprise, diversity, culture, tradition, and vitality stands as strong as granite, as powerful as our rivers, and as eternal as our land. The "Gate City" is poised, ready to go forward and will continue to make history.