Lowell Mill Girls - Industrialization of Lowell

Industrialization of Lowell

In 1813, businessman Francis Cabot Lowell formed a company, the Boston Manufacturing Company and built a textile mill next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. Differing from the earlier Rhode Island System, where only carding and spinning were done in a factory while the weaving was often put out to neighboring farms to be done by hand, the Waltham mill was the first integrated mill in the United States, transforming raw cotton into cotton cloth in one building. While Lowell died in 1817, his operation was quite successful and his business partners looked to replicate their success on a larger scale.

In 1823, the investors organized the Merrimack Manufacturing Company and purchased land near Pawtucket Falls to expand its textile manufacturing operations. In 1826, the land was incorporated as a separate town, and being primarily concerned with and run by the textile interests, was named "Lowell" in honor of the late Francis Cabot Lowell. In less than 20 years, a sparse collection of family farms was transformed into the industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts. In that time, ten textile corporations opened 32 mills in the city. Women were "collected" or recruited by men telling tales of high wages available to "all classes of people." In 1840, the factories employed almost 8,000 workers — mostly women between the ages of 16 and 35.

The "City of Spindles", as Lowell came to be known, quickly became the center of the Industrial Revolution in America. New, large scale machinery, which had come to dominate the production of cloth by 1840, was being rapidly developed in lockstep with the equally new ways of organizing workers for mass production. Together, these mutually reinforcing technological and social changes produced staggering increases: between 1840 to 1860, the number of spindles in use went from 2¼ million to almost 5¼ million; bales of cotton used from 300,000 to nearly 1 million, and the number of workers from 72,000 to nearly 122,000. This tremendous growth translated directly into large profits for the textile corporations: between 1846 and 1850, for instance, the dividends of the Boston based investors, the group of textile companies that founded Lowell, averaged 14 percent per year. Most corporations recorded similarly high profits during this period.