Early Textile Centers

• three Boston shipping merchants--Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, and Francis Cabot Lowell--decided that war was interfering with business too much and they should try diversifying into manufacturing.  Established the Boston Manufacturing Company
• Lowell toured England and studied the textile factories, memorizing the machines.  He was also concerned by the miserable conditions of workers and wanted to develop a different system in America
• Lowell wanted better conditions for workers but also had to make conditions better to get enough workers
• the Boston Manufacturing Company set up the first larger factory doing spinning and weaving under one roof in Waltham Mass. in 1814
• hired an English mechanic named Paul Moody to build them a power loom
• capitalized at $400,000, which was about ten times more than Slater Mill
• Lowell also persuaded the federal government to put in place a tariff on imported cloth

PEM photo--power loom, Slater Mill NHS

PEM photo of image at Lowell NHP

PEM photo--Lowell Dam

• to go to an even larger scale they needed more waterpower
• they also wanted to build factories away from the city to avoid the problems of England
• the partners chose a site where the Merrimack river went over a 33 foot drop
• by 1822 they had put up over $1 million in capital
• the first mill opened in 1823
• the investors not only built their own mills but also sold land and waterpower to other companies to build mills in Lowell

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PEM photo of image at Lowell NHP

• where were they going to get the workers for these big factories out in the middle of nowhere?
• the mills were built by Irish laborers but prejudice was so strong they weren't allowed to work in the mills
• hired young women between the ages of 15 and 25 from farm families all over New England
• lived in company-built boarding-houses under the supervision of a matron, were required to go to church and observe many detailed factory rules

PEM photo--Lowell boarding house

• in the 1830s and 1840s they averaged 73 hours of work a week (12-14 hour day, 5 1/2 days a week)--see timetable
• worked at the mill an average of 3 years, then many returned to their home towns to marry
• in the early years they generally found it an adventure--see Harriet Robinson's Lowell Mill Girls and more links
• as competition increased wages were lowered and the work speeded up (see information on slavery vs. factory work ).  Women workers did organize strikes and other protests .

• immigration increased in the mid-19th century, particularly after the Irish potato famine began in 1845
• immigrant workers replace the women workers, generally with the whole family working in the mill
  

 immigration to the U.S>

• other work was slowly opening for women

 1829 schooteacher

• in the 20th century mills closed because they couldn't compete with southern textile mills--see for example Boott Cotton Mills .

• In 1860 there were three mills in Greenville County
• But since the invention of the cotton gin growing cotton was a better investment than a mill
• slave owners didn't want the men and women they owned crippled by mill work, which was very dangerous

 Child workers, textile mill. Photo by Lewis Hine

• the early mills after the civil war were still powered by water power so were built where there were fast moving rivers
• many of the workers came from the mountains--families who could no longer support themselves on small farms

Worker in Carolina Mill, Louise Hine, 1908

• the whole family including children over 8 usually worked in the mill

 The Doffer (Hine?)

• southern mill towns were complete communities--families rented a house with a number of rooms equal to the number of family members who worked in the mill, shopped in the company store.  Many mills even had baseball teams.

Mill House in Newry, Oconee County (PEM photo)

• African-Americans weren't allowed to work in most mill jobs, only in construction and in the first step of opening the cotton bales.

 African American workers unload cotton bales

• After about 1910 mills ran on electricity and were built on the outskirts of cities and towns
• workers had more choice of where to shop but they were usually scorned by the townspeople as "lintheads"

PEM photo--Lowell Turbine

Lowell technological innovation: James Bicheno Francis (1815-1892)

• grew up in England and worked with his father on railroads and canals
• in 1833 came to the United States and got a job as an assistant to the engineer George Washington Whistler
• became chief engineer of the Lowell Locks and Canals Company in 1837 and director of that company in 1845
• set up a full-scale laboratory to study waterpower--first worked on the design of canals
• the efficiency of waterwheels was the next question.  In 1844 Appleton Mills purchased a turbine designed by Uriah Boyden .  Francis tested it and was impressed and 1849 he had the Lowell companies purchase the patent
• he made improvements, but more important tested a variety of turbines in his lab to figure out rules of how to build an efficient turbine
• he tended to want to test things for himself before he believed the equations other engineers had developed
• Lowell also had a machine shop that first built the machines for the factories but also became an important early builder of locomotives for the railway

 Lowell