Inside a Historic Lowell Cotton Mill

In a recent post, I followed Sarah Gilbride and her children from Pittston, Pennsylvania to Lowell, Massachusetts, as they sought out a new life. I discovered this Gilbride-Lowell connection shortly before traveling to Boston this past summer to see my older brother Tim. Since history is of interest to my husband, me, and my brother, I proposed we take a trip to Lowell to visit the Boott Cotton Mills Museum and the Lowell National Historic Park. I wanted to get a glimpse of what it might have been like for our ancestors to work and to live in that community.

Visitors to the Park can first review a video and exhibits within the visitor center, where we learned about the history of Lowell and its rise as an industrial powerhouse. Photographs and timelines helped give us context. 

A walk down the canal-lined streets took us to the nearby Boott Cotton Mill. On the way, I was struck by the careful planning of the streets, neatly laid out in a grid pattern, and striking red brick rows of buildings which at one point housed so many mill workers. 

Boott Mill Weave Room

The Boott factory itself is enormous. It's main and most impressive feature is the Weave Room, crammed with over eighty historic power looms from the 1920s, which are still used to weave cotton cloth today under the direction of the National Park Service. Here, we were able to get a small taste of what Lowell’s mill girls and immigrant laborers would have seen, heard, smelled, and felt when they worked in the mills. 

To give you a sense of the noise produced by just a few machines, we were provided with earplugs to protect our hearing before entering the room. I cannot image how workers could stand the amount of noise generated by all 80+ machines running at once—without ear protection! And this room is a scaled-down version of a historic room; there would have been more machines in the typical weave room. Vibrations from the machines thrummed through the floor into our feet as we walked through.

Here's a video shot by Tim that day:  

 

The factory produced beautiful cotton fabrics which were highly popular both in the U.S. and abroad.

Page from a cloth sample book in the Boott Mill exhibit.

 

This dress belonged to Mary Gregg Butler who worked in the Lowell mills in the 1820s. This is the only mill girl garment known to exist from that time period.

Detail of dress calico, made between 1826-1830.

 

 

Sample of cotton cloth woven today by National Park Service staff in the mill, and sold in the gift shop. (Photo by T. Gilbride)

Another nearby building housed a "mill girl" boardinghouse exhibit. Though our Gilbride ancestors arrived in Lowell after mill girls were the primary factory operatives, it was still fascinating to see how they lived. 

 

The dining room was the only common room in the boardinghouse, where meals and socializing occurred. The young ladies who lived here were kept to a strict schedule revolving around the mill.

 

A typical boardinghouse bedroom, shared by 2-4 mill girls.

The boardinghouse keeper's room. The keeper was responsible for all aspects of the supervision of the girls in her care.

 

 

 

The afternoon we spent in Lowell was a fascinating trip back in time, to a place our ancestors called home. On my next trip to Boston, I hope to visit Lowell again, especially to view Saint Patrick Cemetery, where most of our distant Gilbride relations are buried. 

Until next time...

 

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IMAGES/VIDEO: 

• Top image of Boott Cotton Mill courtesy of the National Park Service. 
• Video recorded by Tim Gilbride.
• All other photographs by N. Gilbride Casey, unless otherwise noted.