Attachment_20_BCMM_Exhibit.pdf

LOWE Attachment 20 June 1987

LOWELL – A SPINDLE CITY

The Emergence of Lowell

Lowell was one of America’s first large-scale planned industrial cities. It was founded by a group of wealthy Boston merchants during the 1820s. They intended to develop an

American industrial system which would produce substantial profits for investors while avoiding the human misery associated with English factory life.

By planning to employ New England farm women for only a few years each, and housing them in company-owned boardinghouses, the Boston-based mill owners hoped to make their industrial city morally respectable. By promoting public virtue they sought to make industrialization acceptable while ensuring their high place on the social ladder.

Initially Lowell was a world-famous success story. The population jumped from about

3,500 in 1828 to nearly 35,000 in 1850. By mid-century, the city contained ten major textile corporations that employed over 10,000 workers and produced more than 2 million yard of cloth per week.

Boott Cotton Mills

The Boott Cotton Mills was incorporated in 1835, and it began producing cotton cloth a year later. Once constructed, the mill complex consisted of four large, separate mill building and various smaller structures. The corporation employed 950 women and 120 men. During an average week in 1840, the Boott produced 155,000 yards of cloth.

For most of the nineteenth century, the production of cloth was a profitable but highly competitive enterprise. Consequently the owners of the Boott made several changes in their operations. They constructed new buildings, installed additional looms and spindles, improved machinery, transformed the power systems, and hired more workers.

In 1905, the Boott Cotton Mills was purchased by new owners. At the time, the factory complex consisted of nine main buildings. The corporation employed 790 women and

850 men. During an average week the Boott manufactured 450,000 yards of cloth.

However, a host of problems plagued the corporation. Confronted by aggressive

Southern competition, an outmoded physical plant, high taxes and recurrent conflicts between workers and managers, the Boott Mills Company decided to close its textile operation in 1954.

Since then the mill complex has served a variety of industrial functions. It has been used as a warehouse, a shoe factory, a toy-making plant, a printing shop, and a computer assembly plant. Recently rehabilitated, the Boott Mills is becoming home to a new generation of businesses.

Problems and Promises

Lowell’s early success contributed to its undoing. Other cities followed Lowell’s lead as a textile center, but increased competition reduced profits.

Both the city and the workforce suffered as owners became concerned with dwindling profits. Poor working conditions, strife between employees and managers, absentee ownership, and competition from other industrial centers cast a shadow over Lowell’s good fortune.

Many New England women who worked here became disillusioned during the mid-nineteenth century, and began to leave the city after shorter stays. More and more, they were replaced by low-paid immigrant laborers searching for a foothold in America.

By the early 1920s, Lowell was in the throes of hard times. Many mills closed, many textile workers lost their jobs, and many corporations abandoned the city and its people for more promising locations. After a brief revival during World War II, Lowell seemed to be a community with a great past and a dismal future.

In recent decades, the city has been undergoing a rejuvenation in a more diversified economy. Lowell is having a second change. Many of its citizens hope that the experiences of the past will serve as a guide in charting the future.

The Mills of Lowell 1876

The first of Lowell’s great textile mills – the Merrimack Manufacturing Corporation – began operations in 1823. Toward the end of the century, when Lowell was at its height, the city contained approximately 175 mill buildings with over 900,000 spindles. The mills employed more than 20,000 workers.

Consequently, Lowell was called the ―Spindle City,‖ and a stretch of mills along the

Merrimack River was referred to as the ―Mile of Mills.‖

Lowell mills transformed bales of raw cotton into bolts of finished cloth. Each individual textile corporation consisted of several buildings which housed many different kinds of machines: pickers, carding machines, throstle spinners, and power looms, to name only a few. In a Lowell factory, the entire cloth-making process was performed at a single site.

This integrated system of manufacturing existed in Lowell on a scale never before attempted in the United States. Lowell mills produced cheap, standard goods in large quantities. In these ways, Lowell was a pioneer in the development of mass production by American industry.

The city’s factories were part of an international network which joined Southern plantations, Boston merchants, New York fashion houses, transport lines, and worldwide markets.

Mill Workers

There have been a good many foolish essays written upon the beauty and divinity of labor, by those who have never known what it is to earn one’s livelihood by the sweat of the brow…Let such be silent. Their sentimentalism is a weariness to the worker.

John Greenleaf Whittier

American Poet

The Stranger in Lowell, 1845

The people who worked in the Lowell textile mills played a major role in the Industrial

Revolution. In turn, their experiences here transformed their lives.

The vast majority of Lowell’s industrial labor force—American-born and immigrant— came from rural settings. In the countryside the daily rhythms of life and labor were determined by the seasons and the weather.

Work in a textile factory was far more rigidly structured than agricultural work. Clocks, formal regulations, timetables, hourly wages, piece rates and anonymity were hallmarks of industrial labor. In making the transition from the farm to the factory, workers were leaving traditional societies and entering the industrial world.

This restored mill building, as well as the operating weave room and the historical exhibits, stand as a monument to the mill workers of Lowell.

Boott Mills Improvements

It is now proposed to add a new mill…of five stories…The mill will be built on Bridge St., between the canal and Central bridge…The Courier says the new mill will have 15, 744 spindles, and 406 looms, and all the appurtenances of a first-class mill…The Lowell

Machine Shop is to furnish the machinery. When this mill is finished, the Boott will have

111,000 spindles and 2400 looms .The mill will be run by water, with steam for an auxiliary in a dry time.

Local Newspaper, 1868

Why the Boott Mills?

The National Park Service chose Boott Mills as the site for exhibits not because its history was unique, but because the Boott was a typical Lowell textile mill. With structures dating from the mid-1830s, the Boott complex is itself a prized artifact. It demonstrates the evolution of the textile industry in New England from its earliest years of hope through its decades of maturity until its time of decline.

This particular building—Boott Mills No. 6—was constructed over a two year period, 1871-1873. The view shown here is a fanciful illustration of the mill complex.

Discovery Trail

Welcome to the Boott Cotton Mills Museum! No boots or shoes were made here! This factory was named after Kirk Boott who helped to plan Lowell. See if you can find out what this factory did make. Follow my friends, and have fun learning about living and working in Lowell.

WEAVE ROOM

Weaving was one of the final steps in the production of cloth. Before reaching the weave room, the cotton was picked, cleaned, carded, and spun. After leaving this room, it would have been inspected, packed, and shipped.

Our weave room exhibit is intended to give the impression and experience of a typical mill workplace during the first part of the twentieth century. The room, however, is not a recreation. In reality, the noise would have been louder, and the heat and humidity higher than the levels you will experience. Also, there would have been more looms packed onto the floor, and the air would have been filled with cotton dust.

Because of the heat, humidity, noise, and vibration, you may find it uncomfortable to be in the weave room. Try to imagine working all day, day after day for years, in the mills.

The thing that stands out in my mind was that weave room with those noisy looms. I was a small kid, and I was pretty overwhelmed. At a very young age I had had it. I remember

I’d be walking over the Central Bridge to Lowell High School. The steam would be coming out of the Boott Mill, floating over the bridge. It was so cold that the steam would form tiny little snowflakes. Every time I’d walk across that bridge and saw those snowflakes, I’d think of my mother in those wretched mills. I ended up doing some work in them, but no longer than I had to. Once I leaned that I could talk people into buying things, that was it for me in the mills.

Ronald Bacon, 1984

Mill Worker

Manufacturing Cloth

The invention of the power loom was a critical step in the emergence of the integrated textile mill. Previously, weaving was performed on hand looms, often in the home.

Other steps in the cloth-making process were performed either as small nearby mills of in other homes.

In the integrated textile mill, the entire process was centralized in a single location. In the weave room, each worker tended several power looms. Compared with hand processes, tending a loom in the factory required less skill, but it demanded close attention.

I remember a lot of Polish people and a few Greek people. They were working so hard.

They wanted to buy their own home, and they were trying to save. So, husbands and wives would be working. Some jobs, the jobs I did in my life, I don’t think they should have been a woman’s job. It should have been a man’s job, but you hardly ever saw a man doing the jobs that I did. They wouldn’t go for that stuff. They worked as a machinist or in the stockroom. They’d bring out the stuff for us, but they wouldn’t work on those frames. It was mostly all women then. I never stopped working until I was sixty-eight.

Valentine Chartrand, 1984

Generations of Mill Workers

Mill managers were constantly in search of labor. Initially they employed New England farm women between the ages of 15 and 30 to work in their Lowell mills. With few other opportunities available, these women were willing to work a few years for factory wages.

By the middle of the nineteenth century – as the women became disillusioned with the factory system and as the pressure to cut labor costs grew – the agents began recruiting lower-paid labor from Canada and other countries.

Subsequently, they looked to immigrants from Greece, Poland, Russia, Portugal, and

Colombia for workers.

The subsequent shift of the textile industry from New England to the South and later to

Latin America and Asia was partly related to this ongoing quest for laborers willing to work for low wages.

In the 1940s, some of the girls wore dungarees and loafers. The older women wore cotton dresses. We had a large locker room with our own lockers and good facilities. But it was hard work. You can’t say it wasn’t. Mill work was hard. You had to keep going all the time.

Jean Rouses, 1984

I walked with my father to work in the morning and back with him at night. We used to start at 6:30 in the morning and work till 5:30 at night. Saturday you got out at noon. Big deal! You had Saturday afternoon off.

Grace May Burk, 1985

When I was young, I gave my mother my pay envelope unopened. The kids working at fourteen, fifteen years old brought their pay home. They gave it to Ma, and Ma gave the kids as much as she felt fitting. The parents used a good party of the pay for household expenses. That’s the way it went in those days. Pa would do the same thing: give Ma his money.

Leona Bacon Pray, 1985

Working Conditions

Weave rooms were hazardous work environments. Life-threatening accidents and long term health disabilities were common by-products of employment in the textile mills.

Cotton dust caused lung and respiratory diseases. The noise was deafening and impaired hearing. The lighting was poor, the hours long, the work tedious, and the machinery and belting dangerous.

In the weave room, both heat and humidity were kept high to prevent the yarn from breaking. Workers, who were paid by the piece, were often willing to endure the humidity because it increased both productivity and their pay checks. Nevertheless, work in this environment was eventually debilitating.

Until the Massachusetts Ten Hour Law was passed in 1874, the factory work day was often eleven hours or longer. However, many manufacturers easily evaded the law.

In the weave room we had no ear protection at all. I still get trouble in my ears. I went to the doctor. I told him I can’t hear too good. He asks me where I work. I told him the weave room. He says, ―Just forget it.‖ Those looms used to bang-bang-bang all day. Get in your ears, but you can’t take that out. He told me my ears were perfect, but can’t do nothing.

John Falante, 1985

The Weave Room Crew and their Jobs

Weavers were not the only persons working in a weave room. Loom fixers, smash piecers, sweepers, battery boys, oilers, change-over men, scrubbers, inspectors, overseers, and second hands also worked here.

The entire weave room crew needed to develop a high degree of coordination to make this highly interdependent system work. Because the noise from the machines was nearly deafening, workers often communicated with signs and gestures.

Overseer

Supervised weave room operations.

Second Hand

Assistant to the overseer

Inspectors

Repaired heddles and checked for errors when a new warp beam was tied in, or other mistakes. They carried pickers, scissors, and trimmers to make repairs without damaging the cloth. They also did some paper work to keep track of the looms in operation and the pick clocks.

Loom Fixers

Made their rounds with a box of tools to make repairs. They needed to work closely wit the weavers to keep the looms running and reduce down time.

Weavers

Weavers wore aprons with many pockets to hold the variety of hooks, scissors, picks, and combs they used to repair broken threads. They kept rags to oil and then wipe the shuttles. Often weavers swept their own alleys (the aisles between rows of looms). Once a week they shut their looms down to brush off the lint and oil the machine.

Twisters

Tied-in a new warp when the old warp ran out so that the same pattern could be produced on the loom.

Smash Piecers

Called in when a large number of threads broke during weaving. They frequently used a hand knotter to tie broken threads together.

Drop Wire Girls

Drop wires stopped the motion of power looms. When a thread broke, the wire dropped, causing the stop motion to shut down the loom. Wire girls had to thread each wire individually.

Battery Boys

Filled the batteries with fresh bobbins so the shuttles never ran out of thread.

Bobbin Boys

Carted in the bobbins for the battery boys to load.

Change-over Men

Removed empty warp beans and hoisted new ones into place.

Cloth Boys

Marked the warp with a spot of dye so that the weavers knew when to stop the loom and call for a new warp beam.

Sweepers

Swept the cotton dust off the floor.

My father worked so hard that he said to my mother, ―I’ll make sure that our children do not go to work in the mills.‖ When I got work in the Boott I told my mother, and she didn’t like the idea. She said, ―Your father’s not going to like that.‖ I went to work, and it was very hot, a lot of noise. After supper, my mother’s talking to me, and I can’t hear a thing. But I liked my work. I was young and strong and got twenty-five cents a night. In my spare time I learned to be a weaver.

Henry Paradis, 1984

Operating the Weave Room

When the Boott Cotton Mills opened in 1836, power looms were located on the top floors of the buildings. Because the vibrations from the looms threatened to collapse the structures, looms were subsequently placed on the lowest floors.

In 1910 the Boott Mills complex contained approximately 3,500 looms. A typical weave room had over 100 looms. Depending on the employee’s experience and the loom model, workers tended varying numbers of looms.

Starting in 1912, operations in this mill were powered electrically. As you see here, large motors were installed at the ends of the rooms to operate the system of shafts, pulleys, and belts that drove the looms. In 1929-30, motors were installed on the individual looms and the belt drives were dismantled.

The looms in this weave room are Draper Model E, built in 1913-21 in Hopedale, Massachusetts. First used in a mill in Fall River, they were moved in 1925 to a new mill in Kingsport, Tennessee, from where they were acquired for this exhibit. The looms have been readapted for belt drive.

Mill Workers’ Tools

Workers made their own tools—by hand—for work in the mills. Each tool was unique, ad often it had a personal significance to the worker. It was not uncommon for tools to be handed down from one worker to another.

The tools in this case were donated to the Park by former Lowell mill workers for display in this exhibit.

[Weave Room exhibit]

I go to work ever day—not earlier than I should at home, nor do I work later, but I mind the confinement more than I should in a more unpleasant season of the year. I have extra work now—I take care of three looms; and when I wrote you before I could not well take care of two. But help is very scarce now, and they let us do as much work as we please;

and I am highly complimented upon my ―powers of execution.‖

Harriet Farley, 1844

The time is often apt to drag heavily till the dinner hour arrives. Perhaps some part of the work becomes deranged or stops; the constant friction causes a belt of leather to burst into flame; a stranger visits the room, and scans the features and dress of its inmates inquiringly; and there is little else to break the monotony. The afternoon passes in much the same manner.

Anonymous Mill Worker, 1945

You ask why we work in the mill? Because the time we do have is our own. The mony

[sic] we earn comes promptly; more so than in any other situation; and our work, though laborious, is the same from day to day; we know what it is, and when finished we feel perfectly free, till it is time to commence it again.

Josephine L. Baker, 1845

I liked weaving. It was intriguing. You had to give it a lot of attention. If you liked it, you could do it well. If you didn’t like it, it was a hard job. I taught I don’t know how many weavers, but some just didn’t have it. You’ve got a lot of things going on at one time. It confused a lot of people. If you knew how to tell them they weren’t going to be a weaver, there was always other jobs that they could do. I know a girl who couldn’t be a weaver, but she was a great drawing-in girl.

Narcissa Fantini Hodges, 1984

I started as a battery boy for threw or four months. From there I went on to be a weaver for another four or five months. Then I became a change-over man. I used to be pretty husky, pretty strong. I had to be in order to be a change-over man. Warps used to come down with the harnesses on it, wand you had to lift it up along to put it in the loom.

Didn’t have no help.

Arthur Morrissette, 1985

The boys used to horse around. They would not work. They would come up our aisles and squeeze us. You couldn’t concentrate. They boys used to get away with murder. One day I got very mad at a boy who was supposed to sweep the aisles. I told him I didn’t like that squeezing. He didn’t care.

Emma Skehan, 1984

Working the late-night shift is hard. Come 2:00 in the morning, your eyes start to close.

You could sleep on a picket fence. Come 5:00, it’s getting daylight. You’re wide awake again. You’re good enough to go to the beach. So we’d have a few beers in back of the police station.

Inspection Machine

Most fabrics require inspection before they are sent to a customer. A typical mill has a department devoted to the task of checking fabric for flaws.

The cloth removed from a loom is marked with the loom number and a shift stamp. The fabric inspector fills out an inspection slip for each bolt of cloth, recording the types of defects and at which yardage point they occur. Sometimes the defect is caused by the weaver, sometimes by a mechanical problem with the loom.

Inspection is an important duty, because a mill loses customers if it produces poor quality fabric.

Bobbin Winder

This 20 spindle Leesona model 90 winding machine was built in Providence, Rhode

Island, in 1914. Except for the addition of an electric motor, it is unmodified. This machine can wind various types of yarns on various types of bobbins, cops, cones, and quills at the same time. It is used here to wind filling yard onto bobbins for the museum’s looms.

LOWELL: VISIONS OF INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

The emergence of a new industrial system in Lowell, New England, and across the country marked a major transformation for the United States.

The call to work of the factory bells signaled throughout 19 th century Lowell the rise of textile manufacturing. Workers streamed through the mill doors, the measure of their days controlled by the clock. They left behind the pace of agricultural labor in their rural communities to join the workforce of the textile mills.

This exhibit explores central questions about the industrial revolution in Lowell:

What were the innovations in technology and business that propelled the growth of the factory system?

How did these innovations affect workers and managers on the job?

More recently, how did Lowell and the textile industry weather the global economic shifts of the 20 century?

All was expectancy. Changes were coming. Things were going to happen, nobody could guess what.

Lucy Larcom, Poet and Former Mill Worker

A New England Girlhood, 1889

The Dawn of an Era 1790-1823

In 1790, when the United States government conducted its first census, the total population of the country was four million. Philadelphia, the nation’s largest city and its capital, consisted of 42,000 people.

By 1820, the population of the United Stats had more than doubled. According to the federal census, there were 9.6 million people living in the country. The nation’s largest city, New York, had a population of 124,000 people.

These three decades were a period of substantial transformation in the new nation.

Although the country remained overwhelmingly agricultural during these years, signs of change were apparent everywhere, especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states.

Textile production played a key role in the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, bringing together diverse elements: cotton grown in the Southern states; money from wealthy Northern merchants; surplus labor from small New England towns and farms;

technical expertise from British and American mechanics; and support and encouragement for the federal government.

With these elements joined together, the nation entered the industrial age.

The Role of Government: The Constitution

The Constitution expressed the Founding Fathers’ intention that the federal government play an active role in promoting the American economy. By ratifying this document, the states gave Congress authority to create a national currency, regulate interstate commerce, and control and promote the distribution of public lands.

Several specific articles and clauses indicate the founders’ belief that the government should stimulate business activity and promote industrial development. The Constitution ensured American manufacturers of a large free trade zone within the United States. By providing for tariff legislation, it also gave American industry some additional protection against foreign competition. A single postal system, uniform standards of weights and measures, and parent protection further simplified and facilitated the conduct of business.

The Constitution also created a framework for settling and defending the West. At the same time, the federal government could establish and maintain a national army to protect these distant territories and economic interests. By providing for both expansion and defense, the Constitution fostered economic development in the new nation.

Over the years, both business and industry have profited immensely from government policy. Repeatedly, business owners, industrialists, financiers, and investors have looked to Congress and various federal agencies for direct support. Eventually, labor, too, appealed to the federal government and won some important victories. Lowell’s history, as a result, has been intimately tied to events in Washington as well as in Boston.

Plantation Economy

Southern planters began to confront serious economic difficulties during the era of the

American Revolution. Their land was exhausted, competition was keen, and the market glutted with their produce—tobacco, indigo, and rice. The emergence of the textile industry in England and the invention of the cotton gin in the late eighteenth century provided many Southern planters with a new source of income.

Plantation South—Lash and Loom

Southern cotton planters and Northern textile mill owners maintained what Senator

Charles Sumner of Massachusetts called an ―unholy union…between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.‖

The brutal institution of slavery in America was propelled by the rapid expansion of the cotton textile industry. Following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton fields spread across the Deep South and slavery expanded. Enslaved Africans planted, harvested, and loaded cotton onto ships bound for the textile mills in England and New

England.

Cotton plantations provided a significant market for Lowell’s textiles. Planters purchased a cheap wool-cotton blend, ―negro cloth, and course cottons to clothe their slaves. Willis

Winn, a former slave, recalled that on his plantation, ―Us slaves didn’t wear nothing but white lowell cloth.‖

Discovery Trail: Picking Cotton

Take a piece of cotton from the basket. Do you feel any lumps? Those are cotton seeds.

Cotton is a plant grown in warm and humid parts of the world. In the Southern United

States, slaves picked cotton before the Civil War. After the cotton was picked, it was put through a cotton gin to remove the seeds, and then it was sent to the mills.

As cotton was picked, it was put into a sack like this one. Try to lift it. Imagine what it would be like to pick cotton in the hot sun carrying a heavy sack all day.

Boston Merchants

A small group of Boston capitalists both funded and profited from the Waltham-Lowell experiment. These men—Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, and others—were shrewd investors who had made substantial fortunes from international trade after the American Revolution. They were part of a world-wide economic network even before they turned their attention to manufacturing cloth.

Mercantile Boston – The Founding Fathers of Lowell

Many of Lowell’s founders originally came from the North Shore of Massachusetts, especially Newburyport. Even before joining together to invest in factories, they were very well acquainted with one another. Indeed, they had cemented their early business dealings by marrying into each other’s families.

As young men, they sailed the world – to India, China, Europe, Africa, South America, and the Pacific Islands – trading goods and reaping profits. When England and France went to war in the 1790s, these men gained a large share of the Atlantic merchant trade.

In addition to international trade, these merchants also invested in a variety of low-risk but highly profitable ventures. They were particularly active in real estate, the insurance business, and banking. At the turn of the century, they began to invest heavily in local transportation systems: bridges, canals, and turnpikes.

Anti-American trade actions by Britain and France led to an American embargo on foreign trade in 1807. Cut off from their most profitable line of business, the merchants were in need of new commercial projects in the years of embargo and during the subsequent War of 1812 with England.

The Waltham Experiment

The founding of Lowell was the outgrowth of a prior venture in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell, traveling in England, observed the flourishing textile industry. When he returned to America he persuaded several of his merchant friends to invest in a manufacturing scheme.

Although some of his associates were hesitant, Lowell convinced a small group to join him in forming the Boston Manufacturing Company. By leading the drive toward

American industrialization, he believed he would secure his own position and the place of his friends in a fast-changing world.

Lowell and his colleagues conceived of the textile mill as an integrated manufacturing system. Consequently, they established a factory where virtually all the machines needed to make cloth were placed under a single roof. Paul Moody, an American master mechanic, helped make this goal a reality when he and Francis Cabot Lowell designed a power loom based on British machines that Lowell had observed.

In 1815, Lowell and his associates produced their first cloth in Waltham. The venture proved extremely profitable.

Their subsequent decision to add calico printing to cotton cloth production created a short-term problem because the sluggish Charles River could not provide sufficient water power for their ambitious plan. Consequently they decided to expand their operations to

East Chelmsford, where the Merrimack River would meet their need for increased waterpower.

The Waltham manufactory is the largest and probably the most prosperous in the United

States…It is a magnificent and truly national establishment.

Niles Register, 1821

An employee agreement between Allan Pollock, an Agent for the Boston Manufacturing

Company, and a skilled laborer from Manchester, England. March 21, 1822:

It is hereby mutually agreed betwixt Allan Pollock Agent for the Boston Manufacturing

Co on the One part and Henry Smith on the other that the said Company on said Smiths arrival in Boston are to pay him for his Service in their employ the Sum of One Hundred and Fifty Pound, Sterling for Annum of a for a term of not less than two or three years, and also on their part to pay his passage in the vessell for Boston and also the expences

[sic] previously incurred at Liverpool, the said Smith on his part agrees to take stops for accomplishing the same at his own risk without implicating the said Pollock in that part of the Transactions.

This agreement, dated 1822, explains how the Merrimack Manufacturing Company was to set up a mill in Lowell based on the tools, machines, and expertise of the Boston

Manufacturing Company.

The Boston Manufacturing Company in consideration of the sum of Fifteen Thousand

Dollars, paid to them…doth…Grant, Sell and Convey to the merrimack manufacturing

Co, a free & full right to build and use any machinery…of which the Boston manufacturing Co now hold the Patent rights; And to use any machinery now in use at

Waltham…for which no Patents have been obtained; And…build & use any machinery or improvements on machinery, which the said Boston manufacturing Company may hereafter invent or make…And…shall have the right to use…any patterns for castings…for machinery or Mill Work…And…to inspect and examine the Buildings

Works, Tools, Implements, machinery, modes of operation, processes, improvements, and modifications…And…be entitled…to the Personal Aid, Direction and Advice, of the principal Engineer and Superintendent, of the Boston manufacturing

Company…And…the said Merrimack manufacturing Company, shall not communicate to others…such informations as they may receive by virtue of this agreement…

Industry Emerges

The birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution was in England. During the eighteenth century, a host of changes and innovations—resulting in the steam engine, the water-powered spinning frame, the power loom, and improved precision machine work— helped lay the foundation for an industrial system in Britain. After the Revolutionary

War, small-scale industrial development began emerging in the United States.

Waltham – Early Mills

In England, spinning and weaving mills employed a fast growing labor force in the second half of the eighteenth century. The British government, intent on maintaining its economic advantage, enacted laws prohibiting both the export of new machines and the emigration of skilled mechanics.

Notwithstanding Britain’s efforts, early textile mills appeared in America after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Short-lived manufacturing ventures existed in

Paterson, New Jersey, and Beverly Massachusetts during the late eighteenth century.

An important breakthrough occurred when Samuel Slater – a British mechanic – emigrated from England. In 1792, Slater joined forces with William Almy and Moses

Brown to establish America’s first successful spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Subsequently, Slater and others developed similar mills throughout the region.

This model of the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts, represents the mill complex as it appeared in 1820.

The company consisted of several buildings. Mill No. 1 was built in 1813-14 and Mill

No. 2 in 1816-18. Mill No. 2 became the model for construction of mills later in Lowell.

Each of these structures was a fully integrated textile mill where raw cotton bales were transformed into bolts of cloth.

Textile machines for the factory were made and repaired in the three story machine shop near Mill No. 2.

Factory workers, primarily New England women drawn from the countryside, were housed in company –owned boardinghouses. The corporation also provided housing for skilled craftsmen and mechanics. The Charles River provided the various mill buildings with power. One of the reasons the owners decided to expand their operation outside of

Waltham was because the shallow Charles could not power additional factories.

Rural East Chelmsford

Before Lowell was incorporated as a town in 1826, the site was known as East

Chelmsford. Settled in the 1650s, East Chelmsford was a small, self-contained farming community. The overwhelming majority of its residents grew their own food and made their own clothing. Shortly after the American Revolution, however, East Chelmsford began to change profoundly.

East Chelmsford – Farming Communities

In small New England settlements during the early part of the eighteenth century, most residents knew each other and many were related. Most of the families in the community shared in the town’s prosperity.

Families – men, women, and children – worked their own land. Except for very young children, each person in the family was expected to help maintain the household economy.

Farm work followed the natural rhythms of the seasons. Spans of intense labor alternated with less demanding periods.

As the population of East Chelmsford grew, available farm land became more scarce.

Individual land holdings, divided axons sons and other family members became smaller.

Each generation found itself with less and less land to cultivate productively.

Although some residents grew more prosperous, many left town for the western part of the state. Others sold their services as craftsmen and day laborers or operated water-powered mills for grinding and sawing. By the end of the eighteenth century, wide social and economic differences began appearing in communities like East Chelmsford.

East Chelmsford Transformed

National and international events began to have a major impact on life in East

Chelmsford after the American Revolution.

Growth and commercial prosperity of seaport towns during the 1790s played an important part in the transformation of East Chelmsford. The Pawtucket Canal (1796), the Middlesex Canal (1803), and the Middlesex Turnpike (1810) linked this inland community with Boston, Newburyport, northern New England, and central

Massachusetts. Inns, taverns, and other small businesses quickly sprang up along these commercial routes.

A severe economic depression following the Embargo of 1807 changed East Chelmsford even more dramatically. One result was the emergence of small scale manufacturing here and in many other New England villages. By 1821, a glass factory, two gunpowder mills, a cotton spinning mill, and a woolen mill equipped with power looms from a neighboring machine shop all existed in East Chelmsford.

Even before Boston money transformed this community into a world-renowned textile center, East Chelmsford had already begun to enter the industrial age.

This, then, is Lowell—a city, springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian

Tales, as it were in a single night—stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the

Merrimack with the sights and sounds of trade and industry…A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change, feels himself as it were thrust forward into a new century.

John Greenleaf Whittier, American Poet

The Stranger in Lowell, 1845

Views of Lowell

Lowell grew rapidly during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In 1826—with only the Merrimack and Hamilton corporations in operation—the population was estimated to be 2,500. Although Lowell’s factories were setting a new standard for scale of operations, they were still dwarfed by the preponderantly rural character of the area.

By 1880, however, Lowell was a major city in Massachusetts. With a total population of

59, 485 the city contained over 100 operating mill buildings, ten major textile corporations, two large machine shops, and a host of smaller businesses. The rapid development of a network of trolleys, railroads, and bridges made it possible for working class residents to move to quieter neighborhoods. By the end of the century, the densely populated city overwhelmed the shrinking rural surroundings.

The emergence and growth of Lowell took place within the context of a larger technological and industrial revolution in both America and Europe. Railroads, telegraphs, farm machines, steam engines, and numerous labor-saving devices for the household appeared during the same era as the Lowell textile mills. Consequently, other factory cities—Manchester, Holyoke, Lynn, Fall River, Nashua, Lawrence, New

Bedford, Danbury, Bridgeport—also emerged in New England during the nineteenth century.

The development of Lowell was only one manifestation of a much larger phenomenon which transformed both America and the world.

The Great Debate

After the American Revolution, public discussion in the country focused on the nation’s political, economic, and social future. The role of industry in the new nation played a prominent part in this debate. Two well known politicians – Alexander Hamilton and

Thomas Jefferson – articulated opposing positions in this lengthy and often passionate controversy.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson’s vision of American society centered around moderate-size farms and agricultural communities. He and his political supporters feared the emerging industrial order would destroy the new American republic.

In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson claimed that democracy could flourish only in a country of small yeoman farmers. For the Jeffersonians, rural ways guaranteed civic virtue.

Although Jefferson’s democratic values were popular, Hamilton’s promise of wealth and power through industry was attractive, too. Americans tried to combine the two visions.

They elected Jefferson president in 1800, and at the same time they supported rapid industrialization.

For his part, Jefferson eventually dropped some of his opposition to industry. He hoped that small-scale industry in rural settings would be compatible with republican virtue.

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton, a leading conservative visionary, was an outspoken advocate of large-scale manufacturing in the United States.

As the Secretary of the Treasury I Washington’s cabinet, Hamilton authored a Report on

Manufactures in 1791. He proposed a government-sponsored program of industrialization to insure the nation’s economic and political independence.

Several prominent Americans endorsed Hamilton’s position. George Washington, John

Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush shared his enthusiasm for the benefits of technology and industry. They believed a strong, centralized government should play a major role in developing American industry.

Lowell’s Heyday 1823-1924

The mills of Lowell underwent several alterations during the nineteenth century.

Technological innovations, economic slumps, national elections, federal legislation, wars, famines, and droughts, as well as shifts in style and fashion, directly affected the fate of the mills.

Inside the mills, relations between workers and managers were sometimes harmonious, often tense, and occasionally tumultuous. Struggles for power were part of everyday life in the factory. A decrease in wages or a change in piece rates could set off a sharp confrontation between workers and managers.

Increasingly, competition from other textile centers played a prominent role in the city’s well-being. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, Lowell had lost leadership in the industry. It had become just one of the several cities struggling for a piece of the textile market.

Had the major owners and managers of Lowell’s mills been more innovative and bold, they might have been able to retain a leading role in the industry. Instead, they chose simply to stay the course. A community once known as a standard-setter in textile manufacturing had become markedly less venturesome and more conservative by the early twentieth century.

Discovery Trail: The Mill System

Look at the factory model. In Lowell’s early years, cloth was made in buildings like this.

Are all the machines in the factory the same? What are the workers doing?

Look for my friends and discover four of the steps in making cloth—carding, spinning, drawing-in and weaving.

The Mill System

When it began operations in the late 1830s, the Boott Cotton Mills consisted of four large identical mill buildings. Powered by water from the Eastern Canal, each of these buildings was a wholly integrated, self-contained unit with a full complement of machines for turning raw cotton into finished cloth.

Each of the buildings stood four stories high. The floors measured 158’ x 45’. These dimensions were very similar to the second textile mill which the Boston Manufacturing

Company had constructed in Waltham between 1816 and 1818.

The individual buildings in the Boott complex produced different products. Mills No. 1 and No. 4 made coarse cotton drillings. By 1846, No. 2 and No. 3 were specializing in fine shirtings, sheetings and print cloth.

Because the mills produced different kinds of cloth, the layout of machinery in the individual mill buildings differed somewhat. Generally, the cotton moved up the factory, with the initial stages of production performed on the lower floors and weaving above.

Vibration problems, however, were magnified by upper story weave rooms, affecting both buildings and workers adversely. This led later in the century to greatly rearranged machine placements with looms usually on the lower floors.

During its 120 years of operations, the Boott Mills changed in many ways. New buildings were added. The entire complex was integrated and the building physically joined. Water power was used to generate electricity. Machines were improved. The layout of machines and the flow of the cotton through the buildings were redesigned.

Notwithstanding these innovations, the ideal of mill system – a harmonious and integrated sequence of mechanized processes which transformed raw cotton into finished cloth – remained a fixed principle.

Growth in the Boott Cotton Mills

1840 1865 1885

Spindles 29,248 71,324 142,080

Looms 830 1,878 3,875

Yards of Cloth

Produced Per

Week

155, 000 350,000 700,000

Female Operatives 950 1,020 1,400

Male Operatives 120 290 478

Boott Mills Building No. 1

The number of production workers at Boott Cotton Mills building No. 1 (represented in this model), estimated from management accounts, was 226 in 1838, 90 in 1876, and 39 in 1910. This steady decline appears to contradict another set of statistics displayed nearby documenting the increasing number of workers in the Boott Mills complex. In fact, the two can be reconciled. Management required ever increasing amounts of work by individual operatives and introduced changes in technology. This allowed them to operate one mill building with fewer and fewer workers. Over the same period of time, the Boott Mills complex was expanding its overall cloth production, adding new buildings which required new workers.

The term Factory, in technology, designates the combined operation of many orders of work-people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power.

Andrew Ure

British Industrialist

The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835

Bale to Bolt: The Industrial Process

In Lowell’s large textile mills, workers transformed raw cotton into finished cloth.

Virtually the entire process was performed under a single roof.

With the exception of power generation and transmission, the basic technology in an integrated textile factory has changed little since the first part of the nineteenth century.

In all there are ten distinct steps in making cloth.

1. Picking – cotton bale is opened, picked, and cleaned.

2. Carding – cotton fibers are combed and straightened into rolls called slivers.

3. Drawing – long slivers of combed cotton are stretched and combined.

4. Roving – slivers are drawn out or lengthened still further and given a slight twist it make roving.

5. Spinning – the elongated roving is given a hard twist to lock the fibers together, and then it is wound as yarn onto bobbins.

6. Dressing – the strong warp yarn is coated with a hot starchy solution to further strengthen it.

7. Warping and drawing-in – the warp yarn is wound onto a beam which is fitted onto a loom, and then the individual yarns are threaded through the loom harness in a process known as ―drawing-in.:

8. Weaving – two kinds of yarn – the strong warp and the soft filling or weft – are interlaced on the loom to make cloth fabric.

9. Finishing – the cloth is bleached, dyed, printed, and inspected for faults and the edges are trimmed.

10. Baling – the cloth is pressed into bolts in preparation for shipping.

Clock and Bell

Coming to Work in the mills meant drastic changes in the lives of workers, whether from rural New Hampshire or Greece. Suddenly, six days a week, lives were controlled by clock and bell.

The large clock beside you, a master watchclock and regulator, was devised in the late nineteenth century to regulate all clocks in a mill complex. Used in the Middlesex Mills from the 1880s to the 1930s, it was moved to the Fairgrieve Belting Company shop when the Middlesex was demolished.

The Role of Government: Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster was one of America’s foremost statesmen and orators during the first half of the nineteenth century. As a lawyer in private practice and later as a U.S.

Representative, Senator, and Secretary of State, Webster used his considerable skills and influence to further the interests of Boston capitalists, referred to by some historians as the ―Boston Associates.‖ He carefully crafted tariff bills, national bankruptcy laws, and patent legislation to benefit New England trade and industry.

Webster, in fact, played a prominent role in channeling substantial amounts of money through the government and into the hands of the founders of the Lowell mills. For example, in 1820, the government in Washington established the Spanish Claims

Commission to distribute $5 million. The money was earmarked for owners of American ships that had been attacked by the Spanish Navy in the period from 1795 to 1815.

Webster, with an eye to the interests of his clients as well as his own pocketbook, represented these Boston ship owners before the Commission. Of the $5 million distributed, at least $1 million went to his friends and their companies, who had been engaged in shipping but were now increasingly involved in manufacturing enterprises.

This handsome windfall arrived at a convenient time for the new industrialists. The

Spanish Claims Commission provided these investors with a sizeable sum of capital during the early 1820s when they financed the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, Lowell’s first great textile corporation. Webster had not only earned his fee, but he was also one of a privileged few people allowed to buy Merrimack Company Stock.

Deborah Skinner, Mill Worker

Deborah Skinner was the first ―mill girl‖ employed in the Lowell textile mills. A skilled weaver, Skinner had worked at the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham before she was brought to East Chelmsford by Paul Moody to work at the recently completed

Merrimack Manufacturing Company.

When the new textile mill commenced operations in October 8, 1823, Deborah Skinner wove the first piece of cotton cloth on her loom. She was also responsible for teaching several other women workers how to operate their looms. Because these other women were trainees, they were not paid by the company until they could produce cloth. As a result, Deborah Skinner was the sole female weaver on the Merrimack’s payroll from

October 8 th to the 19

Subsequently, thousands of women followed her footsteps into the mills of Lowell.

[The Shutes were itinerant artists painting in Lowell in 1932. Mill workers, among others, commissioned them to paint their portraits. The woman in the painting is unidentified.]

Working in the Mill: Spinning

Throstle Spinning Frame

This graceful, decorated machine represents the second generation of machines made to the Lowell Machine Shop. Although built in Lowell for the Merrimack Manufacturing

Company during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was modeled after eighteenth century British textile machines.