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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Paul Moody (May 23, 1779 – July 5, 1831) was a U.S. textile machinery inventor born in Byfield, Massachusetts (Town of Newbury). 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 family lived in the back room of the shop, all sharing one bed "two at the foot and three at the head," as Harriet would later recall. [7] At the invitation of Harriet's maternal aunt, Angeline Cudworth, also a widow, the family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, a center of the textile industry. [8] Lowell was a planned mill town.
Situated at the foot of the Merrimack Canal, the original mills received the full 32' drop of the river. Closely associated with the Proprietors of Locks and Canals and at one point, merged with the company under the same agents (such as Kirk Boott ), the Merrimack Company was the "parent" company of the later Lowell firms - although they were ...
It was common for these women to form writing groups, and out of one of these grew a magazine called The Lowell Offering in 1840. Farley wrote articles and editorials for The Lowell Offering under a myriad of pseudonyms and eventually became editor in 1842; in 1843, Harriot Curtis, a fellow mill worker, became her co-editor. [2]