THE FOUNDERS OF LOWELL.


We do not often hear of strikes at Lowell. Some men tell us it is
because there are not as many foreigners there as at certain
manufacturing centres where strikes are frequent. This cannot be the
explanation; for out of a population of seventy-one thousand, there are
more than twenty thousand foreign-born inhabitants of Lowell, of whom
more than ten thousand are natives of Ireland. To answer the question
correctly, we must perhaps go back to the founding of the town in 1821,
when there were not more than a dozen houses on the site.

At that time the great water-power of the Merrimac River was scarcely
used, and there was not one cotton manufactory upon its banks. At an
earlier day this river and its tributaries swarmed with beaver and other
fur-yielding creatures, which furnished a considerable part of the first
capital of the Pilgrim Fathers. The Indians trapped the beaver, and
carried the skins to Plymouth and Boston; and this is perhaps the reason
why the Merrimac and most of its branches retain their Indian names
Merrimac itself is an Indian word meaning sturgeon, and of its ten
tributaries all but two appear to have Indian names: Contoocook,
Soucook, Suncook, Piscatagoug, Souhegan, Nashua, Concord, Spiggot,
Shawshine, and Powow.

Besides these there are the two rivers which unite to form it, the names
of which are still more peculiar: Pemigewasset and Winnepiseogee. The
most remarkable thing with regard to these names is, that the people who
live near see nothing remarkable in them, and pronounce them as
naturally as New Yorkers do Bronx and Croton. It is difficult for us to
imagine a lover singing, or saying, "Meet me by the Pemigewasset, love,"
or asking her to take a row with him on the lovely Winnepiseogee. But
lovers do such things up there; and beautiful rivers they are, flowing
between mountains, and breaking occasionally into falls and rapids. The
Merrimac, also, loses its serenity every few miles, and changes from a
tranquil river into a--water-power.

In November, 1821, a light snow already covering the ground, six
strangers stood on the banks of the Merrimac upon the site of the
present city of Lowell. A canal had been dug around the falls for
purposes of navigation, and these gentlemen were there with a view to
the purchase of the dam and canal, and erecting upon the site a cotton
mill. Their names were Patrick T. Jackson, Kirk Boott, Warren Dutton,
Paul Moody, John W. Boott, and Nathan Appleton; all men of capital or
skill, and since well known as the founders of a great national
industry. They walked about the country, observed the capabilities of
the river, and made up their minds that that was the place for their new
enterprise.

"Some of us," said one of the projectors, "may live to see this place
contain twenty thousand inhabitants."

The enterprise was soon begun. In 1826 the town was incorporated and
named. It is always difficult to name a new place or a new baby. Mr.
Nathan Appleton met one of the other proprietors, who told him that the
legislature was ready to incorporate the town, and it only remained for
them to fill the blank left in the act for the name.

"The question," said he, "is narrowed down to two, Lowell or Derby."

"Then," said Mr. Appleton, "Lowell, by all means."

It was so named from Mr. Francis C. Lowell, who originated the idea. He
had visited England and Scotland in 1811, and while there had observed
and studied the manufacture of cotton fabrics, which in a few years had
come to be one of the most important industries of the British Empire.
The war of 1812 intervened; but before the return of peace Mr. Lowell
took measures for starting the business in New England. A company was
formed with a capital of four hundred thousand dollars, and Mr. Lowell
himself undertook the construction of the power loom, which was still
guarded in Europe as a precious secret. After having obtained all
possible information about it, he shut himself up in a Boston store with
a man to turn his crank, and experimented for months till he had
conquered the difficulties. In the fall of 1814 the machine was ready
for inspection.

"I well recollect," says Mr. Appleton, "the state of admiration and
satisfaction with which we sat by the hour watching the beautiful
movement of this new and wonderful machine, destined as it evidently was
to change the character of all textile industry."

In a few months the first manufactory was established in Waltham, with
the most wonderful success. Henry Clay visited it, and gave a glowing
account of it in one of his speeches, using its success as an argument
against free trade. It is difficult to see what protection the new
manufacture required. The company sold its cotton cloth at thirty cents
a yard, and they afterwards found that they could sell it without loss
at less than seven cents. The success of the Waltham establishment led
to the founding of Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua, and Manchester. There are
now at Lowell eighty mills and factories, in which are employed sixteen
thousand men and women, who produce more than three million yards of
fabric every week. The city has a solid inviting appearance, and there
are in the outskirts many beautiful and commanding sites for residences,
which are occupied by men of wealth.

But now as to the question above proposed. Why are the operatives at
Lowell less discontented than elsewhere? It is in part because the able
men who founded the place bestowed some thought upon the welfare of the
human beings whom they were about to summon to the spot. They did not,
it is true, bestow thought enough; but they _thought_ of it, and they
made some provision for proper and pleasant life in their proposed town.
Mr. Appleton, who many years ago took the trouble to record these
circumstances, mentions that the probable effect of this new kind of
industry upon the character of the people was most attentively
considered by the founders. In Europe, as most of them had personally
seen, the operatives were unintelligent and immoral, made so by fifteen
or sixteen hours' labor a day, and a beer-shop on every corner. They
caused suitable boarding-houses to be built, which were placed under the
charge of women known to be competent and respectable. Land was assigned
and money subscribed for schools, for churches, for a hospital.
Systematic care was taken to keep away immoral persons, and rules were
established, some of which carried the supervision of morals and manners
perhaps too far. The consequence was that the daughters of farmers,
young women well educated and well-bred, came from all quarters, and
found the factory life something more than endurable.

But for one thing they would have found it salutary and agreeable. The
plague of factory life is the extreme monotony of the employment, and
this is aggravated in some mills by high temperature and imperfect
ventilation. At that time the laws of health were so little understood
that few persons saw any hardship in young girls standing on their feet
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen hours a day! It was
considered a triumph when the working-day was reduced to thirteen hours.
Thirty years ago, after prodigious agitation, the day was fixed at
eleven hours. That was too much. It has now been reduced to ten hours;
but it is yet to be shown that a woman of average strength and stamina
can work in a cotton mill ten hours a day for years at a stretch,
without deteriorating in body, in mind, or in character.

During the first years the girls would come from the country, work in
the mill a few months, or two or three years, and then return to their
country homes. Thus the injury was less ruinous than it might have been.
The high character of the Lowell operatives was much spoken of in the
early day. Some of the boarding-houses contained pianos upon which the
boarders played in the evening, and there was a magazine called the
"Lowell Offering," to which they contributed all the articles. These
things seemed so astonishing that Charles Dickens, when he was first in
the United States, in 1842, visited Lowell to behold the marvels for
himself. How changed the world in forty years! Few persons now living
can remember even the cars of forty years ago, when there were but a few
hundred miles of railroad in the United States.

The train which conveyed the great novelist from Boston to Lowell
consisted of three cars, a gentlemen's car in which smoking was allowed,
a ladies' car in which no one smoked, and "a negro car," which the
author describes as a "great, blundering, clumsy chest, such as Gulliver
put to sea in from the kingdom of Brobdingnag." Where is now the negro
car? It is gone to rejoin its elder brother, the negro pew. The white
people's cars he describes as "large, shabby omnibuses," with a red-hot
stove in the middle, and the air insufferably close.

He happened to arrive at his first factory in Lowell just as the dinner
hour was over, and the girls were trooping up the stairs as he himself
ascended. How strange his comments now appear to us! If we read them by
the light of to-day, we find them patronizing and snobbish; but at that
day they were far in advance of the feelings and opinions of the
comfortable class. He observed that the girls were all well-dressed,
extremely clean, with serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls,
and their feet well protected both against wet and cold. He felt it
necessary, as he was writing for English readers, to _apologize_ for
their pleasant appearance.

"To my thinking," he remarks, "they were not dressed above their
condition; for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful of
their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated with
such little trinkets as come within the compass of their means."

He alluded to the "Lowell Offering," a monthly magazine, "written,
edited, and published," as its cover informed the public, "by female
operatives employed in the mills." Mr. Dickens praised this magazine in
an extremely ingenious manner. He could not claim that the literature of
the work was of a very high order, because that would not have been
true. He said:--

"Its merits will compare advantageously with a great many English
Annuals."

That is really an exquisite touch of satire. He went on to say:--

"Many of its tales inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and
teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence. A strong feeling for the
beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left
at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air.... It
has very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or
fine life."

I am so happy as to possess a number of the "Lowell Offering," for
August, 1844. It begins with a pretty little story called "A Flower
Dream," which confirms Mr. Dickens's remarks. There are two or three
amiable pieces of poetry, a very moral article upon "Napoleon at St.
Helena," one upon the tyranny of fashion, in which young ladies are
advised to "lay aside all glittering ornaments, all expensive
trappings," and to present instead the charms of a cultivated mind and
good disposition. There is one article in the number which Mr. Dickens
would have enjoyed for its own sake. It is "A Letter from Susan;" Susan
being a "mill girl," as she honestly calls herself. She describes the
life of the girls in the mill and in the boarding-house. She gives an
excellent character both to her companions and to the overseers, one of
whom had lately given her a bouquet from his own garden; and the mills
themselves, she remarks, were surrounded with green lawns kept fresh all
the summer by irrigation, with beds of flowers to relieve their
monotony.

According to Susan, the mills themselves were pleasant places, the rooms
being "high, very light, kept nicely whitewashed, and extremely neat,
with many plants in the window-seats, and white cotton curtains to the
windows."

"Then," says Susan, "the girls dress so neatly, and are so pretty. The
mill girls are the prettiest in the city. You wonder how they can keep
so neat. Why not? There are no restrictions as to the number of pieces
to be washed in the boarding-houses. You say you do not see how we can
have so many conveniences and comforts at the price we pay for board.
You must remember that the boarding-houses belong to the company, and
are let to the tenants far below the usual city rents."

Much has changed in Lowell since that day, and it is probable that few
mill girls would now describe their life as favorably as Susan did in
1844. Nevertheless, the present generation of operatives derive much
good from the thoughtful and patriotic care of the founders. More
requires to be done. A large public park should be laid out in each of
those great centres of industry. The abodes of the operatives in many
instances are greatly in need of improvement. There is need of half-day
schools for children who are obliged to assist their parents. Wherever
it is possible, there should be attached to every house a piece of
ground for a garden. The saying of the old philosopher is as true now as
it was in the simple old times when it was uttered: "The way to have
good servants is to be a good master."