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The Lowell system, also known as the Waltham-Lowell system, was "unprecedented and revolutionary for its time". Not only was it faster and more efficient, it was considered more humane than the textile industry in Great Britain by "paying in cash, hiring young adults instead of children, and by offering employment for only a few years and providing educational opportunities to help workers ...
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 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.
In addition to producing cloth, it also produced textile machinery for other companies. The two mills were later connected in 1843, as part of a planned expansion. [7] The power loom was soon copied by many other New England area mills, and modified and perfected along the way. Francis Cabot Lowell died in 1817, at age 42.
A few years later, many of the boardinghouses were destroyed as well. Today, the site is occupied by new arterial roads, parking lots, a few low-rise office buildings, and a high-rise housing tower, as well as the newer buildings of Lowell High School. From 1900 until 1946, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company ran a plant in Huntsville, Alabama ...
By 1845, 31 textile companies—located in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine—produced one-fifth of all cotton and wool textiles in the United States. With the capital earned through these mills, they invested in railroads, especially the Boston and Lowell. These railroads helped transport the cotton from warehouses to factories.
Developed beginning in 1850, Lewiston's canals and mills were the largest textile mill complex in the state, and one of the best-preserved mature large-scale expressions of the Lowell system of cotton textile manufacturing, perfected at Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts earlier in the 19th century. The district includes a series power canals ...
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 ...