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This reliance on immigrant workers slowly turned the mills into what they were trying to avoid—a system that exploited the lower classes and made them permanently dependent on the low-paying mill jobs. By the 1850s, the Lowell system was considered a failed experiment and the mills began using more and more immigrant and child labor.
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.. Unlike 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 ...
Slater Mill. 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 ...
The factory system began widespread use somewhat later when cotton-spinning was mechanized by a series of inventors. The first use of an integrated system, where cotton came in and was spun, bleached, dyed and woven into finished cloth, was at mills in Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts. These became known as Lowell Mills and the Waltham-Lowell ...
Meanwhile, steamboats provided a good transportation system on the inland rivers. With the use of interchangeable parts popularized by Eli Whitney, the factory system began in which workers assembled at one location to produce goods. The early textile factories such as the Lowell mills employed mainly women, but generally factories were a male ...
Slater's business model of independent mills and mill villages (the "Rhode Island System") began to be replaced by the 1820s by a more efficient system (the "Waltham System") based upon Francis Cabot Lowell's replications of British power looms.
1836 Constitution of the Lowell Factory Girls Association 1844 (United States) Lowell Female Labor Reform Association formed. [6] April 1844 (United States) Fall River Mechanics' Association established 'The Mechanic', a weekly paper dedicated "to advocate the cause of the oppressed Mechanic and Laborer in all its bearings." [12] 1847 (Scotland)
The system of operation the company employed became known as the Lowell System. Initially capitalized with $600,000, [2] its typical product was calico cloth. Situated at the foot of the Merrimack Canal, the original mills received the full 32' drop of the river.