A Manufactured City: Lowell's Grand Experiment
By Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow
Francis Cabot Lowell, a young partner in a Boston trading firm, was feeling the stress of his job. It was the early 1800s. Britain and France, two of America's trading partners, were at war, and merchant ships dealing with either country risked attack. Fed up with the conditions, the U.S. Congress embargoed foreign trade in 1807. This hurt American business. The 1812 war with Britain created further disruptions — imported cotton, for example, grew scarce and expensive.
Lowell saw an opportunity in cotton. On the advice of his doctor, in 1810 he took a trip to England to recuperate from his stress. Over the next two years, Lowell visited textile mills in booming Lancashire County and in Scotland, where he saw machines for weaving cloth that were technologically superior to those in America. The British knew this too; they'd made it illegal to let proprietary loom technology out of the country. Undeterred, Lowell memorized the design of the textile machines, and when he returned to New England in 1812, he began work on recreating them in Waltham, Mass.
"Some say he engaged in industrial espionage," says Jane Ward '88LS, the assistant librarian at the American Textile History Museum's (ATHM) Osborne Library in Lowell. Others deemed him a pioneer: Lowell's venture was so successful that after he died in 1817, his colleagues decided to name a new mill town after him. Lowell, Mass., chosen for its proximity to the power-generating Pawtucket Falls, was incorporated in 1826. For the next 75 years, it was the cotton-mill center of the United States.
The town and its mills stood out from the beginning. New England textile manufacturing tended to be done piecemeal in small shops by workers from the immediate neighborhood. But mill owners in Lowell — inspired by what Lowell originally did in Waltham — put all the steps of the process under one roof, and they hired farmers' daughters and other young single women ages 10 to 30 from around New England. The women came in droves, working to earn a dowry, to pay for the education of a brother, or simply to bring more money home to their families. "They weren't going to make a career out of this, but what options did women have?" says Ward. "Schoolteacher, spinster, or go out and make some money of their own for a few years. That was a huge incentive."
Ward is one of three librarians at the Osborne Library, which in various incarnations has been part of the ATHM since both were founded in Andover in 1960. Today, the library and museum live among condominiums and the city's newspaper in a five-story brick building that was once a machine shop. The building is adjacent to a stretch of Lowell's winding canals, which were dug by Irish immigrant laborers who at first weren't allowed to work in the textile mills themselves. The library now owns about 100,000 books, periodicals, catalogs, and photos and nearly 900 manuscript collections documenting the textile industry in New England and beyond, from the 17th century to the present. The range of materials is impressive: from blueprints of mills to 19thcentury factory novels with names like The Mill Agent and Fortunes of a Factory Girl to vivid paper labels that were attached to bolts of fabric. "We had a gentleman in here a few years ago who'd written a 900-page book on the Australian merino sheep, and he says we have the best sheep collection he's ever seen," says Ward, who admits she was astonished by how many pre- 1850 sheep-related books and pamphlets she recently found for a researcher in Osborne's stacks.
Other than a handful of letters, there are few surviving records from individual "Yankee mill girls," as they came to be known, who dominated the workforce in Lowell mills for about 20 years. (By 1840, women made up more than 75% of employees in the town's nine textile firms.) But their story is intriguing to many of us, in large part because of the well documented control that mill owners had over their lives. To persuade families to let their daughters move to Lowell, companies promised to look after the girls. According to Osborne's collection of broadsides that list rules for employees, the companies did so by regulating behavior and restricting their time for most hours of the day. Mill girls usually lived in boardinghouses run by widows or older women who worked for the companies; these keepers enforced curfew, notified factory managers of their wards' rowdiness or relationships with men, and ensured that they attended church on Sundays. Bells rang throughout the day to set the work schedule. In the summer, workers awoke to the clang of bells at 4:30 a.m.; soon after, they set off for a 12- to 14-hour day in a room filled with looms so loud they drowned out all else. "It is very lonesome here," wrote one girl in a letter to her sister. "I go in at 5 o'clock and don't speak again until 7 at night."
But life in Lowell wasn't entirely about work. The city offered cultural opportunities that most of the women had never experienced. They could go to lectures, readings, balls, and the library. For five years starting in 1840, women millworkers wrote, edited, and published a monthly literary magazine called the Lowell Offering. (The Osborne Library owns all but four issues.) The publication "was the natural outgrowth of the mental habit of the early millgirls, for many of the pieces that were printed there were thought out amid the hum of the wheels, while the skillful fingers and well-trained eyes of the writers tended the loom or the frame," writes Harriet Robinson in her 1897 book Loom and Spindle, in which she looks back on her time as a millworker, starting in the mid-1830s when she was 10.
By the 1840s, mills in Lowell were producing about a million yards of cloth a week. The city's prosperity attracted prominent statesmen and writers like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, who visited "to see how Lowell had created this beautiful industrial model where there was no poverty and everyone was a good class," says Ward. But some of the "good class" had become restless. In the 1830s, the mill girls in Lowell went on strike at least twice to protest wage cuts and increased work demands brought about by the increasingly competitive New England textile market. In 2003, the Osborne Library purchased an 1836 letter describing a walkout that was previously unknown. As mill girl Hannah Williamson writes to her friend Mary Fraser: "Saturday the spinners all stopped their work at once and run up around Putman. He grumped and says, 'Oh the devil how shall I get out of this?' . . . Unless they raise the wages they are all going out at 12 o'clock for good. . . . I think you are better off where you are, for there is more girls than you can shake a stick at, at the Lawrence Corporation."
Eventually, the women from New England farms were no longer drawn to the mills, and the companies began to offer jobs at lower wages to immigrants — first the Irish, then French Canadians, and then Syrians, Greeks, Poles, Lithuanians, and others. Little by little, the textile industry migrated south, and by the 1950s almost no manufacturing remained in Lowell. Ward, who grew up in the city, remembers barren factory buildings and a struggling economy — that is, until the 1970s, when, says Ward, "the city saw the chance to play up its heritage, which I don't think anyone had thought of in historical terms." In 1978, Lowell was named the country's first urban National Historic Park.
These days, the ATHM and the Osborne Library do much more than look back. The museum exhibits now explore fashion and new fabrics like those used in the ultrafast "shark-skin" swimsuits made by Speedo or jackets made from recycled pop cans. And the library collects books, periodicals, and catalogs to support these new areas of interest. It's not hard to imagine that the forward thinking Francis Cabot Lowell would approve of the changes.