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    Lowell: The River City
    Lowell: The River City
    Lowell: The River City
    Ebook217 pages1 hour

    Lowell: The River City

    By Lowell Historical Society

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    About this ebook

    Lowell, a historic industrial city, owes its life to the broad Merrimack River. Renowned for its water-powered textile mills, it was also a city rich in natural beauty, where spiritual and cultural values took root. Postcards from the 1890s to the 1940s bear witness to riverscapes, varied waterways, arched bridges, and green parks. Vintage cards depict grand churches and stately mansions, some now altered or gone, and rare interior views. Informative text accompanies the images of yellowbricked colleges, pastoral neighboring environs, dignified cemeteries, and imposing monuments, such as the captivating Lion Monument.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 29, 2006
    ISBN9781439632680
    Lowell: The River 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

      Lowell, Massachusetts, leader of the American Industrial Revolution, was born in the rush of the waters of the Merrimack River and the froth of its falls.

      The river provided necessary waterpower for the 19th century textile mills in Lowell. Mill girls wrote poems extolling this river‘s beauty, and writers as diverse as naturalist Henry Thoreau and Jack Kerouac, beat writer and Lowell native son, were inspired by it. Local citizens recovered from the Merrimack’s floods of 1852, 1896, and 1936. Industrialism and carelessness polluted the river, but a sense of history and ecology drove successful attempts to restore it.

      The second largest river in New England, the Merrimack began as a stream high in New Hampshire. It flowed south through New Hampshire into Massachusetts and continued until it emptied into the Atlantic Ocean near Boston. That was long before the great glacial periods when thick ice covered the area for thousands of years. About 15,000 years ago, the ice flow mercifully stopped. Gradual warming created rolling hills and valleys. Importantly for the yet to be city of Lowell, it altered the course of the Merrimack River so that as the river entered Massachusetts it veered easterly and turned northeast before it found its way to the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport.

      Humans have lived in the Merrimack River Valley for millennia. The last Native people to inhabit the area were the Pennacook. They called the Merrimack River, Merroh Awke meaning strong place. Gathering annually in the spring at the river, the Pennacooks feasted, settled tribal business, and fished in the pools below the river’s Pawtucket Falls. Passaconaway, their revered leader, tried to live in peace with the English colonists. Gradually the Pennacooks’ land was lost to the settlers, but evidence of the tribes has been found in skeletal remains on the banks of the Merrimack.

      The first European to have seen the Merrimack River is unknown, but Samuel de Champlain, while exploring the St. Lawrence River in 1605, is reported to have written in his journal of a beautiful river to the south called the Merrimac. In 1629, the first land grant in the region was issued to Jonathan Wheelwright. English settlers began to come to the Merrimack Valley in 1652, led by Simon Willard.

      More English colonists, mostly farmers, came to the Dracut and Chelmsford areas. They also created a large lumber business in the late 1700s. What a sight it must have been to see logs coming down river and being hauled around the falls by oxen. These same falls provided waterpower in the early 1800s for sawmills and gristmills. Fishing was another river industry of the time. Valuable sturgeon were caught, pickled, and exported to England and eels were sent to Europe as a delicacy. Farming towns, wanting artisans and professionals, offered them land to come.

      Transportation on the Merrimack River was enhanced by the construction of the Pawtucket Canal in 1796. Built to bring logs around the Pawtucket Falls and to develop New Hampshire, the canal was soon supplanted by the successful Middlesex Canal built in 1803. This engineering marvel transported people and goods between Middlesex Village (now Lowell) and Charlestown. It helped prepare the way for big things to come.

      Investors, Nathan Appleton prominent among them, wanted to expand their textile enterprise in Waltham, the first integrated textile mill in the United States. The Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River at East Chelmsford offered them abundant waterpower and, in 1821, they opened the Merrimack Manufacturing Company for the production and printing of cotton calico cloth. East Chelmsford was incorporated as Lowell in 1826, named after Francis Cabot Lowell, one of the early founders of the Waltham textile mill. Canals brought water to the mills and dams controlled the output. The industrial experiment on the Merrimack River was successful. Lowell, Massachusetts, led the nation in cotton cloth production for about 30 years.

      Changes to the land along the rivers of the growing city were documented in prints and paintings. Alvan Fisher was commissioned in 1833 by Kirk Boott, mill agent and early town planner, to capture Lowell on canvas. Fitz Hugh Lane was first to portray the brick mills along the Merrimack’s bank. Itinerant artist, Edwin Whitefield, drew Lowell around 1850 and again in 1876. Both views, drawn from a hill in Dracut, depict the city at the meeting of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers. The 1876 drawing showed marked growth.

      This progress did not serve the Merrimack River well. As early as 1849, Henry Thoreau noted that fish, particularly salmon, were disappearing because dams blocked their migratory path. Factories threw wastes into the river and canals. As Lowell’s population grew, the water pollution increased. It has been recorded that in the 1920s about 12 million gallons of city sewage was dumped into the river daily.

      Environmental awareness and legislation in the 1960s helped to improve the condition of the Merrimack. Around the same time, a broad community coalition, hoping to revitalize a now-depressed Lowell by promoting the city’s significant history, realized the importance of the Merrimack in this effort. In the 1970s, regatta ethnic festivals held on the boulevard parallel to the river, showcased Lowell’s ethnic groups as well as a boating program. The Lowell National Historical Park, enacted in 1978, continues to make the river one of its program themes.

      Now most of the pollution is gone. The Merrimack River is home to blue gills, carp, shad, and a precious few salmon. Strolling on the new Riverwalk adjacent to the mills, one is treated to glimpses of red-tailed hawks, cormorants, and great blue herons. The riverbanks are lush with colorful foliage. One can swim at the reopened beach or enjoy other river walkways, including the popular esplanade in Lowell State Heritage Park.

      Today six hydroelectric dams on the Merrimack River and a hydro plant on the Northern Canal supply power. The river also provides water for thousands through its four water treatment plants.

      In maps of Lowell, the bend in the Merrimack is prominent, but also visible are the almost six miles of canals, and the Concord River. About half the length of the Merrimack, its 50-mile course flows placidly through area towns until it reaches Billerica. There it becomes a series of rapids and falls, providing local white-water rafting, until it joins the Merrimack River in Lowell.

      The Lowell Historical Society in partnership with Arcadia recently produced the first of a two-book series. Featuring postcards spanning the 1890s to the 1940s, Lowell: The Mill City tells a story of the grit and growth of Lowell—its mills, businesses, community services, streets, disasters, and organizations.

      In this book, Lowell: The River City, the Society’s Publication Committee, comprised of Pauline Golec, Lewis Karabatsos, Tom Langan, and Martha Mayo, continues the city’s story. Again using postcards from the 1890s to the 1940s, we still

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