Lowell National Historic Park-Part 1

 Hi everyone. Happy mid-week to you. 

Back at the beginning of February my daughter was on vacation before she started a new job. We met one day in southern New Hampshire and took a little trip  to Lowell National Historic Park in Lowell, Massachusetts.

   In the 1810's, some business men met and decided they would build textile manufacturing mills along part of the Merrimack River in an area of Massachusetts close to the southern  New Hampshire border. They also planned out living places and other needed resources so their  mill workers could have a life close to where they worked.  Their ideas created the first planned industrial city in the United States. 

   This new development was called Lowell,  named after Francis Cabot Lowell, one of those business men. F.C. Lowell had visited England to see how their textiles were produced. He memorized the construction of these British looms so similar automated looms could be built when he returned to the United States. At that time, the design of those British  looms was top secret.  Lowell was able to come back to the US and build a replica. With that replica, the start of American cotton fabric production went into full swing.  Although he did not live long enough to see the  planned mill complexes built (F.C. Lowell died in 1817), the rest of the men decided to name the city after him.

   At one time Lowell, Massachusetts was the largest textile producing area in the United States. The industry was going strong until it became cheaper to produce cloth in the southern US (where the cotton was grown), and then eventually, cloth production was shipped overseas. When the mills went out of business, Lowell went into a deep economic decline.  It was then that some of the old mills  became a National Historic Park to commemorate and be a teaching tool about that part of US history. 

The National Park Service operates some historical museums. In the photo above you can see some boarding houses where the women who worked the mills lived. Part of this building is now a museum. I"ll share that in a future post.

Below are the canals and some of the mill buildings from the mill complexes. The park service operates a museum in the Bootts Cotton mill.

Inside the old Bootts mill, there was one floor still filled with old weaving machines. On the floor above the machines, there was an interesting small museum about the mills.

I can only imagine how loud the entire building was when all the stories were filled with running machines.  When we entered some park rangers started up a section of machines to run, and my ears were ringing when I left.

Plus the cotton fiber dust must have been horrible to breathe in. Factory  worker safety was obviously not like it would be today. You could see the fibers stuck all over the machines.

The roll of the workers (mostly women) was to be sure that the thread spindles were constantly put in and that the machine was actually producing fabric. This is because the machine could weave the fabric automatically, but these older machines weren't robots and needed a person to keep them working. Here are some of those loaded spindles, ready to go onto a loom for fabric production.

Finally for today's post, here's some fabric that was currently being made in the mill. The park service cuts and sells this fabric to help support the park.

I'll share more on Friday. Thanks for visiting.