Lowell
When the first cotton sheeting came off their looms in 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell and the other investors in the Boston Manufacturing Company knew they had launched America’s Industrial Revolution. American factories had produced cotton yarn since 1790, when the British engineer Samuel Slater opened Almy and Brown’s spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but weaving had remained exclusively a domestic handicraft. The British, for their part, had solved the basic problems of the power loom by 1788, but they still made thread in one factory and cloth in another. By contrast, the Massachusetts System of Manufacture, variously called the WaItham system and, after 1823, the Lowell system, turned raw cotton into finished cloth at a single site. As important as this breakthrough was, the system prompted more far-reaching forms of integration in technology, finance, and management. Lowell’s real achievement was the invention of comprehensive industrial systems. Their success, however, hinged on his invention of the “mill girl,” whose ghost presides over the clamor of power looms at the newly restored Boott Cotton Mill in Lowell, Massachusetts.
This museum, which will open to the public this spring, represents the National Park Service’s most ambitious effort to interpret the social significance of American industrialism. As part of Lowell National Historical Park, which was founded in 1978 on the premise that the city is a living museum of American industrial history, the national park operates in partnership with Lowell Heritage State Park and three dozen local civic, educational, and business enterprises. The Boott Museum, housed in the firm’s original Counting House (1836) and Mill No. 6 (1873), joins the Visitor Center and the Mogan Cultural Center as the park’s third major installation. But it is the centerpiece. Boott Cotton Mills ran four of the twenty-two mills operating in Lowell in 1836, then America’s premier center of textile manufacture. An official list of Lowell manufactures for that year claimed 130,000 spindles, 4,200 looms, and 6,800 workers—almost 80 percent of them women. Named for Kirk Boott (1790-1837), the imperious superintendent of Lowell’s first mills on the Massachusetts system, the Boott company brought to $6.1 million the total capital invested in Lowell textile operations. That figure doubled by 1850. By then Lowell was indeed the City of Spindles, more than 320,000 in all.
To experience the demands faced by America’s first modern factory workers, museum visitors enter the Weave Room by the same staircase and hall that mill girls like Lucy Larcom used one hundred and fifty years ago. Weaving originally took place on the top floor, but the looms were moved to the first floor, where the exhibit now stands, when their vibrations began to threaten the building’s stability. Other alterations indicate the difficulty of recapturing the industrial past. Today air conditioning keeps the room comfortable; in Lucy Larcom’s day, windows were nailed shut so the humidity would keep threads from breaking. Modern visitors pass easily along a stand of ninety retrofitted Draper Model E looms (1913-21), scrounged from mills in Tennessee and South Carolina. In 1836 a weaving room contained 110 looms tended by fiftyfive operators, who had so little space for walking that their hair and sleeves often caught in the works. The noise that assaults modern visitors amounts to less than one-fifth of what the workers suffered, since drive shafts now power just eighteen looms, only six of which actually run shuttles to make cloth. Today’s tidy workroom, a light and airy space of highly varnished floors, once saw work begin and end in the dark. Cotton lint filled the air, invading the lungs and clotting walls, windows, and hair. Despite the NO READING signs, workers tacked pages from Bibles and other books above their looms to fill their free moments; the noise prevented socializing. Still, the women who made America’s industrial revolution endured these conditions by choice, unlike the Southern slaves whose bondage grew stronger with the industry. Weavers of 1836 enjoyed some of the highest salaries women could earn, and they reveled in their status as pioneers who drew admiration for themselves and the system they served.
The system began twenty miles south of Lowell in Waltham. Highquality British cottons had become scarce in the United States as tensions built toward the War of 1812, and domestic handlooms could not keep pace even before the war halted imports. F. C. Lowell saw his chance. Visiting Scotland in 1811, he decided that the first step in opening an American textile factory was to study British operations in Manchester, England, where machines performed most of the manufacturing process, and bring them to America.
Britons had begun mass production of high-quality cotton thread in 1779, when Samuel Crompton devised a hybrid drawing machine and spinning jenny (aptly called “the mule”) to spin forty-eight strong threads at once. The automation of weaving proceeded more slowly, partly because it awaited improvements in mechanized spinning and partly because of mechanical problems, including questions of how to halt the loom if a thread broke or the shuttle failed to reach the opposite side, how to advance the warp threads as weaving progressed, and how to stiffen or “size” the warp for maximum strength. In 1786 Edmund Cartwright patented a loom that met all but the last of these needs; by 1803 his assistants had solved the sizing problem as well. The British, worried about competition, prohibited the export of machines and construction data. But neither Parliament nor the machinists of Manchester anticipated that an American could bring off industrial espionage by memory alone.
Working with the master mechanic Paul Moody in 1813 and 1814, Lowell transformed his recollection of Manchester’s machinery into America’s first power loom, whose advanced features stunned his contemporaries. The cloth it produced was inferior to the British product, but it cost so little that it continued to compete successfully even after Britain flooded American markets in 1815 following the end of the war.
Once the loom was ready, Lowell moved on to business matters. First, he and his brother-in-law Patrick T. Jackson bought land and waterpower rights along the Charles River in Waltham, which offered easy access to Boston markets. Although manufacturers usually operated as limited partnerships, the pair formed a corporation, the Boston Manufacturing Company, and secured the backing of Nathan Appleton. The group raised $400,000 in capital, more than ten times the capitalization of the average Rhode Island textile mill, and added another $200,000 by 1820. Such resources allowed the WaItham firm to buy raw materials in bulk, offer credit to their customers, and pay attractive wages in cash rather than scrip. More important, they could attract a suitable work force to a place where labor did not exist.
British workers—entire families and young children borrowed from poorhouses—were already notorious before Lowell visited the Manchester factories. The degradation of this permanent underclass and the filth of the manufacturing cities had spurred Thomas Jefferson to advise, “Let our workshops remain in Europe.” So many Americans agreed that factory owners had trouble attracting responsible workers. Lowell and Moody therefore designed machines sophisticated enough for amateurs to run, though still too complicated for child operators. Some scholars have claimed that in rejecting child labor, the Boston investors were Utopians creating a uniquely republican form of factory life. But one didn’t have to be a Utopian in 1814 Boston to seek an alternative to the Manchester system. Patriotic feeling still ran high a generation after the Revolution, and the Boston Associates (as the original investors became known) ranked among Massachusetts’s social and political elite. New England as a whole cherished the ideal of republican yeomanry—every man a landowning farmer.
The challenge was to integrate the needs of mass production with the values of a new republic. The workers needed for Waltham’s mill would not abandon their farms, except to claim the richer land beckoning in Ohio and Illinois, and they had too many options to accept the constraints of factory work, with its subordination to clock and overseer. But their sisters and daughters had fewer alternatives, since even local teaching jobs went first to men. The young women also presented better credentials. They already knew how to spin and weave; they already lived as subordinates; they already worked hard on the farm, though a changing economy made them more valuable as wage earners than as domestic workers. They might be tempted by an interlude in the city, especially if a hiring agent could reassure their parents that the young women would not lose their virtue—or their marriageability—in the mills.
So along with the integrated mill and its equipment, Lowell invented the “mill girl,” and she captured the imagination of Americans and British alike. As Lowell and his colleagues conceived her, she was an intelligent, virtuous Yankee as eager to send her wages back to the family farm as to learn new skills, make new friends, and experience city life in the years before her marriage. (The idea of a transient work force exploited antipathy to the British class system, but it had an economic advantage too: new workers cost less than experienced ones.) To protect her reputation, she lived in a boardinghouse under the scrutiny of both a resident matron and the mill corporation, which owned the building, subsidized her board, and required regular church attendance.
Her factory-made life—described by an 1842 resident as “a sort of rendezvous”—comes alive in the Working People Exhibit at the Mogan Cultural Center. Today the renovated 1837 boardinghouse fronts the quiet green of Boarding House Park just outside the entry to Boott Mills. In its heyday, however, it faced row after row of identical buildings, each housing skilled male workers in the end units and twenty-five to forty single women in the center. In place of the bells that rang for work and meals from 4:30 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. , the exhibit features audio recordings that re-create the commotion and spirit of boardinghouse life. Peeking into the first-floor dining room, furnished with artifacts from 1840 to 1852, visitors feel the excitement of the girls’ independence in chatter over one of three hot meals served each day. A trip upstairs, where the women slept two to a bed, lets the modern eavesdropper witness the workers’ sisterhood.
With the invention of the mill girl, factory work became a respectable and even desirable occupation. In the hard times following the War of 1812, her wages—$2.25 to $4.00 a week in 1824 —could feed the family in Maine or send a brother to college and still buy a bonnet or two, even after deducting $1.25 for her board. It could also buy personal freedom. Harriet Parley, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, took “an instinctive dislike” to teaching and finally left home to avoid it. “If I had my own living to obtain, I would get it in my own way,” she later recalled; she trusted that the money sent home for nine brothers and sisters would “reconcile them to my lot.” Factory work offered an escape from other problems as well. Parley’s anonymous “Letters from Susan” even praised the factory overseers. “Tell ‘Squire Smith that they are not what he would be in their places,” she wrote her friend Mary. “They treat their operatives better than he does his ‘hired girls,’ and associate with them on terms of as much equality.” No wonder the mill girl became a literary heroine. Within a generation her adventures had sparked popular novels and dramas as well as amateur writings by Parley and her colleagues. The Factory Girl (1847), Mysteries of Lowell (1844), and similar titles filled the circulating libraries.
The Waltham plant made coarse cotton cloth, originally sold for around thirty cents per yard, to compete with homespun and India cloth for the mass market. The plan proved so successful that within six years the Boston Manufacturing Company was processing 450,000 pounds of cotton annually on 5,376 spindles and 175 power looms. The typical Rhode Island mill, by contrast, ran fewer than 1,000 spindles and still sent its yarn out to local handlooms. By 1820 Lowell’s company had reached the limit of the Charles River’s power capacity. The investors decided to expand elsewhere.
Chelmsford, the area around Pawtucket Falls near the junction of the Merrimack and Concord rivers, proved the perfect spot. In fact, the very elements that hurt Chelmsford’s eighteenth-century businesses made the area particularly attractive. The falls’ thirty-two-foot drop generated more than ten thousand horsepower, energy that imperiled logging operations and commercial transportation on the Merrimack. The Pawtucket Canal, which allowed traffic to skirt the falls, solved the problem only until 1803, when the Middlesex Canal diverted commercial traffic. The shipping industry’s difficulties were a manufacturer’s dream: huge amounts of waterpower could now be generated without concern for boats. To be sure, the Boston Associates would need to expand the Pawtucket, which a company called the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals (PLC) controlled. But no major problems stood in the way. Four hundred acres of East Chelmsford farmland cost only $18,339.46, a majority interest in the PLC just $30,217.80. And only small mills—the Chelmsford Glass Company, the Bent and Bush hat factory, a wool-carding factory—competed for land and water.
Lowell himself died in 1817. Waltham was his laboratory; the manufacturing city of Lowell would be his legacy. There, beginning with the establishment of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in 1822, the Boston Associates developed America’s first planned industrial city. There the Yankee mill girl reached her greatest success, inspiring Charles Dickens (among other distinguished international visitors) to effuse over her cleanliness, good health, and womanly “deportment.” There, too, she gradually yielded her place to the successive waves of immigrants who, in the years following the Civil War, became America’s permanent working class.
The new endeavor involved an investment of such scale—$1.2 million in addition to land and PLC stock—that the mills secured their well-being through political means as well as financial strategies. In 1826 the manufacturers protected their interests from those of neighboring farmers by seceding from Chelmsford and forming the industrial community of Lowell. Ten years later the town meeting, which gave every citizen a voice and a vote, gave way to the city council, where elected representatives could give priority to business. Though obviously self-serving for the mill leaders, the change was by no means malignant. In 1836, as the increase in American cotton manufacture began eroding corporate profits in Lowell, mill owners began spending tax money for services needed to recruit and retain workers. By 1846 Lowell had paved streets, a library, a hospital, sewers, and a population that had grown more than tenfold since the Merrimack Company opened in 1823. The mills’ success spawned ancillary industries producing everything from leather machine belts to patent medicines.
The same self-interest that fueled the change to city government prompted the Boston Associates to expand the Proprietors of Locks and Canals Company, the original developers of the failed Pawtucket Canal. In addition to managing waterpower, Locks and Canals soon took on the machine shop, mill construction, and real estate management (in 1826 the Merrimack Company turned over all its land beyond the mills). Future mills would have to lease or purchase land and water rights from the PLC, assuring the Boston Associates of another continuing source of profit. And the PLC supported its industrial and hydraulic research by selling fully built, completely equipped mills to absentee investors. By 1840 such “pre-packaged textile mills,” as the historian Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., called them, amounted to a substantial part of its business.
While the integration of real estate and industrial investment in the PLC enhanced the success of the Lowell project, the subsidiary’s scientists and engineers brought their own distinction to what can be called America’s first laboratory for industrial research and development. Warren Colburn devised mathematical formulas allowing shaft-driven cams to replace weights in power looms. George Washington Whistler, father of the painter James McNeill Whistler (who lived his first three months at 243 Worthen Street), designed the locomotives for the Boston and Lowell Railroad, one of New England’s first when it opened in 1835. As the mills neared the capacity of Lowell’s five miles of power canals, the PLC’s engineers focused on improving the efficiency of waterworks. Uriah Atherton Boyden produced a series of improvements to turbines, including power diffusers and integral dynamometers, in the late 1840s. The Lowell Hydraulic Experiments , written by the chief engineer of the PLC, James B. Francis, in 1855, became the definitive work on the subject.
Today’s visitor to Lowell can still appreciate the accomplishments of these innovators. Waterpower exhibits in the Mack Building at 25 Shattuck Street provide background for the Locks and Canals Tour, which takes visitors on a boat ride along the Pawtucket, Northern, and Western canals. Stops at the old Suffolk Mill and the Guard Locks demonstrate how turbines drive looms and how lock chambers equalize water pressure. As the boat passes the Pawtucket Dam, the sight of the fifteen-megawatt Boott Hydro Plant (a corporate sister of the PLC) illustrates the enduring importance of power from Pawtucket Falls.
The Merrimack Company’s immediate success spawned a host of sister mills, most with the same principals: Hamilton (1826), Appleton (1828), Lowell (1829), Middlesex (1831), Suffolk 1832), Tremont (1832), Lawrence (1833), Boott (1836), Massachusetts (1840), and Prescott (1846). Each new mill established its own specialty—such as cotton prints, carpets, or broadcloth. Together they represented some twelve million dollars in capital. In 1845 a work force of 6,320 females and 2,915 males produced 1,459,100 yards of cloth per week.
One of those women was twenty-year-old Harriet Hanson, a ten-year veteran who began as a “doffer,” removing full bobbins from the spinning frame and replacing them with empty ones. Massachusetts required child workers such as Harriet to attend school three months a year, but otherwise they followed the same schedule as adults, beginning work at 5:00 A.M. and continuing until 7:00 P.M. , with just half an hour each for breakfast and noontime dinner. Still, doffers’ work was not difficult. They spent forty-five minutes of every hour waiting for the bobbins to fill, and Harriet remembered spending the time in childish pursuits: telling ghost stories, singing, and talking with older workers.
Her second year offered excitement of a different kind. Conflicts between the mill girls and management had already resulted in one strike—about a sixth of the women had “turned out” in February 1834, when the Boston Associates reduced piece rates 12 to 25 percent—and the women struck again when October 1836 brought an increase in the boarding charges they paid through payroll deductions. The cuts were particularly offensive because they did not affect men, who worked for daily wages, not piece rates. The very spirit of republican yeomanry that kept their brothers on the farm made the young women sensitive about their economic and personal independence. “We remain in possession of our unquestionable rights,” their 1834 union credo read. ”… As we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still.”
The troubled 1834 economy drove the daughters back to the mills within a few days, but the boom time of mid-1836 gave them more power. Determined not to fail again, about twentyfive hundred workers formed a Factory Girls’ Association to protest a new cut in wages, of about a dollar a week at a time when the average weaver earned about sixty-six cents a day. Most union members, some 30 percent of the workers, stayed off the job, and elevenyear-old Harriet led the exodus from the spinning room. To the tune of “I Won’t Be a Nun,” the strikers insisted, “Oh! I cannot be a slave/ I will not be a slave/ For I’m so fond of liberty/ That I cannot be a slave.”
Many years later Harriet bitterly recalled that “this strike did no good,” but the historian Thomas Dublin has found some evidence of success. The Merrimack and Boott mills seem to have rolled back their board increases. Harriet herself remained in the mills, rising steadily through the ranks (with two years’ hiatus to attend high school) until 1848, when she left her highly paid job of dresser at Boott Mills to marry a journalist, William S. Robinson. But her mother lost her post as matron of a Tremont Company boardinghouse in retaliation for Harriet’s participation in the strike. As the panic of 1836 developed into the depression of 1837, wages continued to decline. Many Yankee women went home during the turnout and did not return to serve the “lords of the loom.”
For those who stayed, Lowell offered far more compensations for hard work than did the farm. Atop the list was self-improvement. Mary Hall still had enough energy after a day at the Merrimack’s looms for lectures on ancient Rome and phrenology at the Lowell Lyceum, whose speakers included Horace Greeley, John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In the early 1840s Lowell claimed at least seven Mutual Self-Improvement Clubs. Libraries did a booming business: first the Mechanics and Laborers Reading Room (1825), then the private subscription library (from the mid-1830s), and finally the Lowell City School Library (1844) and the Merrimack Corporation Reading Room for Females (1844). When they weren’t reading literature, the women were often writing their own. Many of their stories, poems, and essays appeared in the Lowell Offering (1840-45), a monthly magazine that began as the project of a church-sponsored literary club. With such offerings as “Home in a Boarding-House” (1842), “A Weaver’s Reverie” (1841), and “The Ten-Hour Movement” (1845), the magazine gave expression to the women who made the system work. The Offering created such a stir that Dickens took a stack of issues back to England as proof that American factories improved rather than degraded their workers. Other publications followed.
While these publications showcased the mill girl, however, her working life became increasingly less glamorous and congenial. Belt-drive technology allowed management to control the looms’ speed; it was reduced 13 percent in 1842 and 1844, but the weavers had to tend four machines instead of two. This raised productivity more than 70 percent while wages rose only 16 percent. Members of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association wrote fervently on behalf of the ten-hour movement, but it died in 1847. By then most of the operatives’ magazines had also folded, for their primary contributors and readers were voting against the mills with their feet. Some women left for their farms, others for jobs in the growing profession of teaching. Their exodus raised the percentage of immigrant mill girls from 4 percent in 1836 to nearly 62 percent in 1860. The idyll had ended.
By August 1861, with the Civil War under way, the Merrimack company found it more profitable to sell its inventory of cotton than to produce cloth, and it suspended production entirely. The remaining Yankee mill girls returned to the country, never to re-enlist at the mills. By the war’s end the companies had discovered a plentiful, more compliant labor force in the increasing number of European immigrants who had no farms to escape to.
In its shift from Yankee to immigrant labor, Lowell ceased to be an exemplar of American industrialism and became instead a representative of it. After the Civil War the Lowell system defined industrial America: ownership by absentee investors, manufacture on a huge scale, management by professional agents, sponsorship of research and development, and control over workers, critical suppliers, and local government. As the textile industry moved south, however, the achievements of Lowell and the Boston Associates lost their purpose. Lowell’s decline in the mid-twentieth century mirrored a national industrial crisis. Urban-renewal programs in the 1960s left only the Boott Mills intact.
The Weave Room at the Boott Museum encapsulates this contrast between the early and later Lowell. Since old equipment was continually adapted or replaced in favor of more efficient processes, few industrial artifacts remain from the textile mills’ most innovative period. Fewer still work.
As a result, the museum represents symbolically what it cannot re-create historically. The volimteer decent in the Yankee mill girl’s dress stands in a weaving room built for immigrant workers, and she demonstrates machinery far more sophisticaled than Lowell and Moody’s loom. Her looms feature an 1895 attachment known as the Northrop battery, which automatically resupplies the shuttle when a bobbin runs out. The Boott’s original mill girls performed that job every five or six minutes on each of the three or four looms they tended. They urgently needed a quick way to re-thread the shuttle, for when the thread ran out, the loom stopped, and so did the pick counter on which wages were based. So they sucked the new thread through the eye of the shuttle rather than poke it through, a technique that became known as the “kiss of death” because it spread tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. Of necessity, the Boott Mills Museum interprets rather than preserves history.
Today Lowell retains more than a historical interest in its traditional industries: Joan Fabrics and Pellon still make cloth, and Boott Hydro still extracts power from Pawtucket Falls. But America’s original industrial city is remaking itself for an information economy based on education, tourism, and storytelling.
In 1978 local business and civic groups joined the U.S. Congress and National Park Service in establishing the Lowell National Historical Park. Idle factory buildings, looms, and boardinghouses now support walking, canal, and trolley tours. Stilled breast wheels now illustrate the development of waterpower. Boarding House Park offers a site for festivals celebrating the Irish, French Canadian, Greek, Eastern European, and Portuguese immigrants who succeeded the Yankee workers. Mill girls, immigrants, and overseers roam the city as innovative local history programs inspire youngsters to reenact the past.
Francis Cabot Lowell would surely take pleasure in these novel forms of integration. The National Park Service has added others by combining commercial and exhibit space. In a former boardinghouse complex, the Mogan Cultural Center houses the Center for Lowell History and a Working People’s Exhibit. Display and multimedia areas of the Visitor Center share space with subsidized senior-citizen housing and food concessions. Environmental consultants have set up shop across from the museum in the Boott Mill Yard.
In Boott Mill No. 6 rooms once used for carding and spinning yarn, setting up and sizing warp threads, and bleaching and dyeing cloth now host the Tsongas industrial History Center, which conducts educational programs, the New England Folklife Center, and the park’s own multimedia exhibits on textile technology, the social and economic history of Lowell, and work in the future. The restored looms in the Boott Weave Room still produce cotton cloth, but it is made into towels for sale as souvenirs, for Lowell’s legacy today is memory.
