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    Lowell: The Mill City
    Lowell: The Mill City
    Lowell: The Mill City
    Ebook198 pages36 minutes

    Lowell: The Mill City

    By Lowell Historical Society

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    About this ebook

    From its birth in 1826, Lowell has thrived, declined, and been resurrected as a mill city. Today, it is celebrated for its rich history. These postcards from the 1890s to the 1940s display the energy of this industrial city and its native and immigrant population as it grew, built, worked, and played. Vintage cards capture both familiar mills along the Merrimack River and vanished businesses. Coupled with compelling narrative, they tell stories of a horse-drawn fire engine, textile mill workers, grand civic buildings, floods, and even the aftermath of an explosion.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 7, 2005
    ISBN9781439632314
    Lowell: The Mill City
    Author

    Lowell Historical Society

    Lowell: The River City, a companion to Lowell: The Mill City, was compiled by the Lowell Historical Society Publication Committee, which consists of Martha Mayo, Tom Langan, Lewis Karabatsos, and Pauline Golec. The Lowell Historical Society, reincorporated in 1902, is the successor of the Old Residents� Association, organized in 1868, and is one of the earliest historical societies in the nation. The society�s mission is to collect, preserve, and publish materials related to Lowell and to encourage and promote the study of the history of the city.

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      Book preview

      Lowell - Lowell Historical Society

      01852.

      INTRODUCTION

      The white boundary marker, complete with the state seal, reads, Entering Lowell, Inc. 1826. But the area now known as Lowell, Massachusetts, had attracted people long before the 1820s. Native Americans, the earliest residents, fished near the great falls of the Merrimack River. In the 17th century, English Colonial settlers farmed in a rural village christened Chelmsford.

      By the early 1800s, entrepreneurs were taking advantage of the turbulent waterpower provided by the Merrimack River and starting small textile mills and sawmills. Newburyport merchants tried to gain the New Hampshire market by building a canal that would bypass the river’s Pawtucket Falls at East Chelmsford. The Pawtucket Canal’s transportation business was eventually ruined when the new Middlesex Canal, financed by Boston merchants, connected the Merrimack River above the falls with Boston.

      About 10 years later, Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, toured textile mills in England, returned home, and coupling his memory with the mechanical skill of Paul Moody, built a power loom. Dramatic results were set in motion. In 1814, F. C. Lowell and other investors opened the Boston Manufacturing Company, the first integrated cotton mill in the country using power looms. This successful venture in Waltham fanned plans for expansion and a search for more abundant waterpower.

      And so the investors brought the Industrial Revolution to the small village of East Chelmsford in 1821. The Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River had plentiful waterpower to run the textile machinery. The Pawtucket Canal became the center of the canal system. Irish laborers came to help build the canals and factories, and later more arrived, fleeing the Potato Famine. Many young women and some men from rural New England farms worked as operatives in the new red brick factories and lived in the attractive brick corporate boardinghouses. Francis Cabot Lowell never lived to see East Chelmsford be renamed Lowell in 1826. By 1830, Lowell had become the model for other industrial centers and in 1836 was incorporated as a city.

      The Lowell Experiment continued to thrive. In 1856, the mill city could boast thousands of looms weaving millions of yards of cloth. Textile-related industries such as dye houses and machine shops, as well as a successful patent medicine company, were established. However, all was not perfect in this industrial utopia. As early as the 1830s, determined female workers turned out to protest wage cuts and working conditions with occasional success. Their fight for better working conditions and a shorter workday continued until 1874, when the Massachusetts legislature became the first in the country to pass a 10-hour workday for women and children.

      Slavery was one of the most important national issues in the early 1800s and had a marked effect on the mill city. The textile industry in Lowell was dependent on cotton yet abhorred slave labor. Eventually, the tension between southern slave owners and northern abolitionists exploded into the Civil War. During the war, many mills, unable to get supplies of cotton, reduced production or closed. While the local textile industry suffered, local men marched to battle. Some hometown youths and men achieved national prominence. Luther Ladd and Addison Whitney, mechanics in the Lowell Machine Shop, were the first Union soldiers killed; Gustavus V. Fox, graduate of the first class at Lowell High School, served as assistant secretary of the navy; and Benjamin F. Butler, attorney and mill owner, became an infamous Civil War general. These and many other Grand Army of the Republic veterans would be long remembered in Lowell, as fine civic monuments were built in their honor.

      After the Civil War, textile production went into high gear. Yankee widows and families poured into the city looking for work in the mills. In addition, hundreds of French Canadian immigrants also arrived. They were followed by men and women from Greece, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, and many other countries, who also came to work in the mills. Boott Mill records reveal that in 1912, of its 1,549 textile workers, 1,312 were immigrants or children of immigrants. Ethnic neighborhoods were formed. The new immigrants built churches and clubs and started businesses. They gradually became an integral part of the city. Political force was won in turn by the Irish, French Canadians, Greeks, Polish, and today, the Cambodians.

      From the Civil War until the 1920s, Lowell’s mills were among the most productive in the world. In the mill city in 1920, more than 25,000 men and women worked in its textile industry. Gaining prominence as the seat of North Middlesex County, the city expanded its boundaries. The population, bolstered by immigrants and their families, reached the impressive high point of 112,759 in 1920.

      But some historians tell us that the seeds for a slow decline had been planted. Competition from other northern textile companies, labor unrest, immigrant quotas, and reliance on fluctuating demands for cotton contributed to the gradual fall of the mill city. From the mid-1920s to the 1960s, most of the huge textile mills, one by one, closed their doors.

      Lowell, a historic industrial city once visited and lauded by prominent figures, was on the skids. In the 1960s, the people of Lowell leapt into action. Educators, businessmen, bankers, community groups, and civic leaders crafted plans for an urban historical site celebrating the mill city’s industrial, ethnic, and architectural heritage. Fifth District congressmen and native sons F. Bradford Morse and Paul Tsongas were successful in the long drive resulting in the federal act establishing the Lowell National Historical Park in 1978.

      The ethnic culture of the city was enriched with the arrival of Southeast Asians (primarily Cambodians) and Hispanics. Currently, Brazilians and West Africans are coming to the mill city. Lowell’s cultural, educational, and economic life is vibrant. Its festivals draw large crowds. Its schools, community college, and university are creating new dynamic partnerships. Its historic downtown is being restored and filled with shops, restaurants, and museums. And finally, its old commercial and mill buildings are being converted into apartments, artists’ lofts, and condominiums. The city along the Merrimack is again alive and on the move.

      The history of Lowell, one of the leading centers

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