Lowell, the Story of an Industrial City : A Guide to Lowell National Historical Park and Lowell Heritage State Park, Lowell, Massachusetts (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Lowell, the Story of an Industrial City: A Guide to Lowell National Historical Park and Lowell Heritage State Park, Lowell, Massachusetts

The city's brick mills and canal network were, however, signs of a new human domination of nature in America. Urban Lowell contrasted starkly with the farms and villages in which the vast majority of Americans lived and worked in the early 19th cen tury. Farming was largely a matter of accommoda tion to the natural world. Mill owners prospered by regimenting that world. They imposed a regularity on the workday radically different from the normal routine. Mills ran an average of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for more than 300 days a year. Only when it suited them did the owners follow seasonal rhythms, operating the mills longer in summer but in winter extending the day with whale-oil lamps.

Lowell's canals depended on water drawn from a river, but to use the Merrimack as efficiently as possible, the mill owners dammed it, even ponding water overnight for use the next day. Anticipating seasonal dry spells, they turned the river's watershed into a giant millpond. They were aggressive in pur chasing water rights in New Hampshire, storing water in lakes in the spring and releasing it into the Merrimack in the summer and fall.

Damming alone would not have created enough power to run the mills. Lowell's industrial life was sustained by naturally falling water. At Pawtucket Falls, just above the Merrimack's junction with the Concord, the river drops more than 30 feet in less than a mile - a continuous surge of kinetic energy from which the mills harnessed over horse power. Without the falls, there would have been no textile production, no Lowell.

Pawtucket Falls had long been the focus of human activity in the area. If the tumbling water meant power to European settlers, to the nearby Pennacook Indians it was a source of food. Neighboring tribes regularly met at the falls in the spring to reap the bounty of the annual runs of salmon and sturgeon. While Indians planted cr0ps near their villages, they did not possess the land or own it individually as the English did. They moved about with the seasons, leaving themselves open to encroachment by settlerswho coveted their land. With the incorporation of Chelmsford in 1655, a permanent English presence was established near the Pennacook villages. Con flict and displacement soon followed.

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