40 years ago when we lived in New England, we knew that Lowell was a town about 20 mile away, that it had fallen on hard times and was having hard time rising again. Today we journeyed to a rejuvenated Lowell, one that celebrates its past and is building towards its future. What a change. Several weeks ago, we were in Pawtucket, RI where the American Industrial Revolution began, today we visited Lowell, where it found fruition. In Pawtucket, it was a few factories, in Lowell, it was a whole planned town. It became America’s first great industrial city.
Why here? It was all about the Merrimack River which plunged 32 feet within 1 mile from one side of Lowell to the other. Several Boston merchants, looking for ways to invest their money and increase their fortunes, saw this as a great opportunity to build their mills. 2 men had been in England and had surreptitiously observed how their mills and machines worked, brought their ideas to America and established the first mill town. They dug canals to distribute the water power to more areas, built mills, built housing, built churches and schools and, voila, a mill city was born. There was no one living in Lowell in the early 1800’s but by 1850 Lowell had a population of 33,000, second only to Boston in MA, and over 10,000 were employed in the mills.
Here’s a map showing the mills in red the housing in blue and the canals flowing through.
They designed it as a utopia with green spaces and were concerned with the moral and physical well-being of the employees, who were, at first, young, single New England women, called ‘Mill Girls.’ Working in the mills promised a cash wage, room and board, economic independence, and more experiences than they could have had in their small rural agricultural villages. BUT, and there’s always a ‘but’, the mill owners enforced strict hours and discipline, the boarding houses keepers enforced strict curfews and moral codes. They worked 5 1/2 12-hr days and Church attendance was required on the only day the Mill Girls had off. And they had to go to the church the mill owners went to.
Better get your pink foam earplugs before you enter the Boott Cotton Mill, because when you open the door you’ll hear the ear splitting noise of the 13 looms that they still have running. The NPS keeps between 12 & 14 machines working to give you an idea what it was like. Any more than that and the sound would be too loud. When we walked in the sound was deafening with only the 13 machines running. We couldn't talk. The Mill Girls used hand signals to say anything to each other. And, that is only a fraction of those that worked back in the heyday. Here’s a scale model of what it looked like back then.
We saw 2 women (with earplugs) working at the machines, keeping them operating and showing you what a ‘mill girl’ would be doing during her day. They can answer your questions but talking over the deafening noise or the machines is just this side of impossible. You get a real feel for what the ‘mill girls’ went through with the ear-damaging noise (they had no ear plugs), poor lighting, high heat and humidity, dangerous machinery and air filled with cotton dust.
And, here’s the schedule they worked: note the 12-hr work day although it varied between 12 & 14.
Lowell had its heyday in the 1800’s but competition increased, owners moved their mills South where wages were lower and cotton didn’t have to be transported so far and, by the 1920’s and 1930’s, Lowell’s mills had closed and thousands were out of work.
It wasn’t until the late 1960’s that Lowell began its resurgence. Citizens noticed that the old mill buildings were being torn down and realized that they needed to preserve their heritage. Local, state and federal government combined with private organizations and corporations to make this into a living history town. Technology companies discovered Lowell. One company, Wang, one of the leaders in word processing, built 3 huge towers for its corporate headquarters. Gary worked for them for 5 years but they then faced strong competition from other firms with desktop and laptop computers - and are gone now too. Today you can take a trolley tour, a canal boat tour, visit any number of museums, experience a mill, tour a boarding home and stroll the many canals on trails. They’ve come a long way from the Lowell of the 70’s when we lived near-by.
Ever hear of Whistler’s father? I certainly haven’t. Whistler’s mother gets all the publicity, all the love. She’s a superstar. His father - who ever hears of his father? Well, let me introduce you. Here he is - in a painting by Chester Harding not Whistler himself. This is a picture of a Whistler not by a Whistler. Not so iconic as his mother. This painting is only 1/30th the size of the mother but infinitesimally small in renown. But he was the one who supported Whistler in his quest to become a painter.
In 1835, Whistler became Chief Engineer at the Proprietors of Locks and Canals in the new city of Lowell, Massachusetts. During his time in Lowell, he was responsible for early American locomotive designs. So wide was his renown in 1842— about the time of this little painting—that Czar Nicholas I hired him to build the Moscow-St. Petersburg railway. George Washington Whistler died there doing so, much too young, in 1849.
We began with a trolley tour on a Streetcar named Desire, # 966 built by the Perley-Thomas North Carolina firm back in 1924. It rolled through the French Quarter of New Orleans until 1964 and was the car which inspired Tennessee Williams’s play, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’
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We took a canal boat ride through some of the canals in Lowell. The canals were built for 2 purposes, one side was for the transportation of goods and had locks in it. The other side was for power and the water rushed over water wheels. Here’s what is called the industrial canyon, with factory walls on both sides rising high above the canal.
The locks have been opened so the water can raise us up to the next level of the canal.
Much of the ride is a peaceful journey down who could almost pass as a river.
Here are the walls of the canal. All built by hand, by Irish laborers and not a bit of cement in the walls - all pieced together.
And here are the canal cleaners. The canals needed to be cleaned every week: they were drained on Saturday and the cleaners cleaned on Sunday. A mucky,mucky job. Note how they lower the cart from the top of the canal.
Not only was there an actual factory floor filled with machines and several machines working, we also toured the museum upstairs where they had other machines that worked.
All of these machines were incredibly dangerous with all their moving parts. Everyone had to watch themselves well but, when they were forced to work so fast, accidents happened. Here’s a list of accidents that we saw.
But, here is a description, in the words of a factory worker, of some accidents he witnessed. And, believe me, it is brutal - you may not want to read it.
The work was brutal, the hours long, the pay was low: not everything about the Industrial Revolution was what we would call progress. However, it happened and is a part of our history and helped make America. Lowell, where it all began is laying it out there for us all to see, the good, the bad and the ugly. Very well done presentation.
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