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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.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
The Waltham mill, where raw cotton was processed into finished cloth, was the forerunner of the 19th-century American factory. Lowell also pioneered the employment of women, from the age of 15–35 from New England farming families, as textile workers. [2] These women became known as the Lowell mill girls. Women lived in company run boarding ...
By Julia Halewicz There's a persistent rhythm to the sewing machines at the Colonial Mills factory in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Needles puncture through cords of cotton and linen, binding yards of ...
By 1810, dozens of spinning mills dotted the New England countryside. However, cloth production was still fairly slow with this system. While on a visit to Lancashire, England, in 1810, [5] Francis Cabot Lowell studied the workings of the successful British textile industry. He paid particular attention to the power loom, a device for which ...