The Lowell Mills and the Birth of Industrial America

In the mid-eighteen thirties, a young woman named Lucy Larcom left her home in Beverly and traveled west to the new mill town of Lowell. She was about eleven years old. Her father had died; her family needed income. She took a job in a cotton mill, tending bobbins, and worked there for roughly ten years.

Lowell was the first planned industrial city in the United States. It had been designed from the ground up by a group of Boston investors, the Boston Associates, who had copied the textile machinery designs from England. The city's mills ran on the water power of the Merrimack River, channeled through a network of canals. By the eighteen thirties, Lowell was producing more cotton cloth than any other place in America.

The labor force was almost entirely young women from New England farms, drawn in by wages far higher than anything available at home and by the paternalistic boarding-house system the company provided. The mill owners called it the Lowell System. The workers called it something different. The workdays ran fourteen hours in summer. The boarding-house keepers reported on church attendance. Wage cuts in eighteen thirty-four and eighteen thirty-six triggered the first organized labor strikes by women in American history. The women called them turn-outs.

By the eighteen forties and fifties, the farm-girl workforce was being replaced by Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine. The conditions worsened. The wages fell. The company towns and the paternalistic rhetoric faded away. What remained was industrial capitalism in its early, unregulated form. Lowell was the future of American work, for better and worse, and it arrived here first.