Lowell, North Carolina: A Mill Town's Borrowed Name

When founders settled this Gaston County community, they reached all the way to Massachusetts for a name. The Woodlawn Mill had been established on the South Fork of the Catawba River around eighteen forty-eight, and the men behind it had ambitions. They named their settlement after Lowell, Massachusetts, the most famous mill city in America, as a declaration of what they intended to build.

The ambition was genuine if modest in outcome. Lowell was incorporated in eighteen seventy-nine and became one of dozens of cotton mill communities that filled the Gaston County piedmont, a landscape that would make the county one of the great textile centers of the South. The mills defined the town for generations. Today Lowell sits in the shadow of Gastonia, absorbed into the greater Charlotte metro, a quiet city of a few thousand residents whose borrowed Massachusetts name is about all that remains of the founders' original declaration.