The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, during the rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century.
The textile industry was one of the earliest to become mechanized, made possible by inventions such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and water frame around the time of the American Revolution. Models of production and labor sources were first explored in textile manufacturing. The system used domestic labor, often referred to as mill girls, young women who came to the new textile centers from rural towns to earn more money than they could at home, and to live a cultured life in the city. Their life was very regimented: they lived in boardinghouses and were held to strict hours and a moral code.
Competition grew in the domestic textile industry and wages declined, so workers began to go on strike. Resistance was led by the young women known as mill girls. With the mid-nineteenth-century growth in immigration and social changes post-Civil War, mill owners began to recruit immigrants, who often arrived with skills and were willing to work for lower wages. By mid-century, the Waltham-Lowell system proved unprofitable and collapsed.
The precursor to the Waltham-Lowell system was used in Rhode Island, where British immigrant Samuel Slater set up his first spinning mills in 1793 under the sponsorship of Moses Brown. Slater drew on his British mill experience to create a factory system called the "Rhode Island System", based on the customary patterns of family life in New England villages.
He first employed children aged 7 to 12 at the mill, and personally supervised them. He hired the first child workers in 1790. Slater had tried to recruit women and children from other areas for the mill, but that fell through due to the close-knit framework of the New England family. Instead he recruited whole families, and developed entire company towns. [1] He provided company-owned housing nearby, along with company stores. He also sponsored a Sunday School where college students taught the children to read and write.
The Waltham-Lowell system pioneered the use of a vertically integrated system. [2] Here the owner/managers had complete control over all aspects of production. Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and cutting were now completed in a single plant. [3] This high degree of control prevented another company from any interference with production.
The Waltham mill also pioneered the process of mass production, which greatly increased the scale of manufacturing. Water-powered line shafts and belts connected hundreds of power lines. The increase in manufacturing occurred so rapidly that there was no localized labor supply in the early 19th century that could have sufficed. [4] Lowell solved this problem by hiring young women, typically from rural areas and small towns.
After the successes of Samuel Slater, a group of investors called The Boston Associates and led by Newburyport, Massachusetts merchant Francis Cabot Lowell devised a new textile operation on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, west of Boston. This firm was the first in the nation to place cotton-to-cloth production under one roof, incorporated as the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1814.
The Boston Associates tried to create a controlled system of labor, unlike the harsh conditions that they observed while in Lancashire, England. The owners recruited young New England farm girls from the surrounding area to work the machines at Waltham. The mill girls lived in company boarding houses and were subject to strict codes of conduct and supervised by older women. They worked about 80 hours a week. Six days per week, they woke to the factory bell at 4:40 a.m. and reported to work at 5 before a half-hour breakfast break at 7. They worked until a lunch break of 30 to 45 minutes around noon. The workers returned to their company houses at 7 p.m. when the factory closed. This system became known as the Waltham System.
The Boston Manufacturing Company proved immensely profitable, but the Charles River had little potential as a power source. Francis Cabot Lowell died prematurely in 1817, and soon his partners traveled north of Boston to East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where the large Merrimack River could provide far more power.
The first mills formed the Merrimack Manufacturing Company and were running by 1823. [5] The settlement was incorporated as the town of Lowell in 1826 and became the city of Lowell ten years later. It boasted ten textile corporations, all running on the Waltham System and each considerably larger than the Boston Manufacturing Company. Lowell became one of the largest cities in New England. The model became known as the Lowell System; it was copied elsewhere in New England, often in other mill towns developed by Boston Associates.
Eventually, cheaper and less organized foreign labor replaced the mill girls. Even by the time of the founding of Lawrence in 1845, there were questions being raised about the viability of this model. [6] One of the leading causes of this transition to foreign labor and the demise of the Lowell system was the coming of the Civil War.
Girls served informally as nurses, moved back to their family farms to help these run, or took other positions that men had left when they joined the army. [7] These girls were out of the mills for the duration of the war. When the mills reopened after the war, the girls did not return because they no longer needed the mills. They had rooted into their new occupations or moved on in life to the point where the mill was no longer suitable for them. [7] The lack of mill girls meant that the owners turned to Irish immigrants, who had arrived in number beginning in the mid-1840s fleeing the Great Famine (1845-1852).
The Irish community developing in Lowell, Massachusetts was not exclusively female, unlike the previous housing of mill girls in dormitories. [8] The proportion of male employment at the mill increased, which rapidly changed the demographics of the people that worked there. [8] The Lowell plant became highly dependent on the foreign lower-class, especially the Irish immigrants who flocked to Massachusetts. [2]
Lowell is a city in Massachusetts, United States. Alongside Cambridge, it is one of two traditional seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of the last census, and the third most populous in the Boston metropolitan statistical area. The city is also part of a smaller Massachusetts statistical area, called Greater Lowell, and of New England's Merrimack Valley region.
Lowell National Historical Park is a National Historical Park of the United States located in Lowell, Massachusetts. Established in 1978 a few years after Lowell Heritage State Park, it is operated by the National Park Service and comprises a group of different sites in and around the city of Lowell related to the era of textile manufacturing in the city during the Industrial Revolution. In 2019, the park was included as Massachusetts' representative in the America the Beautiful Quarters series.
Francis Cabot Lowell was an American businessman for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named. He was instrumental in bringing the Industrial Revolution to the United States.
Samuel Slater was an early English-American industrialist known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution", a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson, and the "Father of the American Factory System". In the United Kingdom, he was called "Slater the Traitor" and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He memorized the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the U.S. at the age of 21.
Paul Moody was a U.S. textile machinery inventor born in Byfield, Massachusetts. He is often credited with developing and perfecting the first power loom in America, which launched the first successful integrated cotton mill at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, under the leadership of Francis Cabot Lowell and his associates.
The Boston Associates were a loosely linked group of investors in 19th-century New England. They included Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, Abbott Lawrence, and Amos Lawrence. Often related directly or through marriage, they were based in Boston, Massachusetts. The term "Boston Associates" was coined by historian and professor of economics and Marxism, Vera Shlakman in her 1935 work, Economic History of a Factory Town, A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts.
Completed in 1796, the Pawtucket Canal was originally built as a transportation canal to circumvent the Pawtucket Falls of the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford, Massachusetts. In the early 1820s it became a major component of the Lowell power canal system. with the founding of the textile industry at what became Lowell.
The factory system is a method of manufacturing whereby workers and manufacturing equipment are centralized in a factory, the work is supervised and structured through a division of labor, and the manufacturing process is mechanized. Because of the high capital cost of machinery and factory buildings, factories are typically privately owned by wealthy individuals or corporations who employ the operative labor. Use of machinery with the division of labor reduced the required skill-level of workers and also increased the output per worker.
The Lowell Offering was a monthly periodical collected contributed works of poetry and fiction by the female textile workers of the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills of the early American Industrial Revolution. It began in 1840 and lasted until 1845.
Martin Brendan Fleming was the mayor of Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1982 to 1984, and a member of the Lowell City Council for nine terms between the years of 1969 and 1992. Fleming was a faculty member in the mathematics department at Lowell Technological Institute and the University of Lowell for decades, retiring in 1996.
The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated one of the first factories in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership with a group of investors later known as The Boston Associates, for the manufacture of cotton textiles. It built the first integrated spinning and weaving factory in the world at Waltham, Massachusetts, using water power. They used plans for a power loom that he smuggled out of England as well as trade secrets from the earlier horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory, of Beverly, Massachusetts, of 1788. This was the largest factory in the U.S., with a workforce of about 300. It was a very efficient, highly profitable mill that, with the aid of the Tariff of 1816, competed effectively with British textiles at a time when many smaller operations were being forced out of business. While the Rhode Island System that followed was famously employed by Samuel Slater, the Boston Associates improved upon it with the "Waltham System". The idea was successfully copied at Lowell, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in New England. Many rural towns now had their own textile mills.
The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was a textile manufacturer which founded Manchester, New Hampshire, United States. From modest beginnings it grew throughout the 19th century into the largest cotton textile plant in the world. At its peak, Amoskeag had 17,000 employees and around 30 buildings.
The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35. By 1840, at the height of the Textile Revolution, the Lowell textile mills had recruited over 8,000 workers, with women making up nearly three-quarters of the mill workforce.
The history of Lowell, Massachusetts, is closely tied to its location along the Pawtucket Falls of the Merrimack River, from being an important fishing ground for the Pennacook tribe to providing water power for the factories that formed the basis of the city's economy for a century. The city of Lowell was started in the 1820s as a money-making venture and social project referred to as "The Lowell Experiment", and quickly became the United States' largest textile center. However, within approximately a century, the decline and collapse of that industry in New England placed the city into a deep recession. Lowell's "rebirth", partially tied to Lowell National Historical Park, has made it a model for other former industrial towns, although the city continues to struggle with deindustrialization and suburbanization.
Kirk Boott was an American industrialist who was instrumental in the early history of Lowell, Massachusetts.
The Lowell Mills were 19th-century textile mills that operated in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, which was named after Francis Cabot Lowell; he introduced a new manufacturing system called the "Lowell system", also known as the "Waltham-Lowell system".
The Boott Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were a part of an extensive group of cotton mills, built in 1835 alongside a power canal system in this important cotton town. Its incorporators were Abbott Lawrence, Nathan Appleton, and John Amory Lowell, and is named after Kirk Boott, the first Agent of the Proprietors of Locks & Canals in Lowell. Today, the Boott Mills complex is the most complete remainder of antebellum textile mills built in Lowell. The original Mill No. 6 is managed by the National Park Service unit Lowell National Historical Park and houses the Boott Cotton Mills Museum and the Tsongas Industrial History Center for K-12 educational programs.
The Merrimack Manufacturing Company was the first of the major textile manufacturing concerns to open in Lowell, Massachusetts, beginning operations in 1823.
The Merrimack Valley is a bi-state region along the Merrimack River in the U.S. states of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The Merrimack is one of the larger waterways in New England and has helped to define the livelihood and culture of those living along it for millennia.
The Saco-Lowell Shops was once one of the largest textile machine manufacturers in the United States. It was formed in 1912 with a merger between the Lowell Machine Shop with the Saco-Pettee Machine Company. At its peak in the 1920s, the company had manufacturing facilities in Lowell and Newton, Massachusetts, and Biddeford, Maine. The company maintained their executive office at 77 Franklin Street in Boston, and also had a southern office in Charlotte, North Carolina.