LOOM AND SPINDLE OR Life Among the Early Mill Girls WITH A ...

CHAPTER II.
CHILD-LIFE IN THE LOWELL COTTON-MILLS.
In attempting to describe the life and times of the early mill-girls, it has seemed best for
me to write my story in the first person; not so much because my own experience is of
importance, as that it is, in some respects, typical of that of many others who lived and
worked with me.
Our home was in Boston, in Leverett Court, now Cotting Street, where I was born the
year the corner-stone was laid for the Bunker Hill Monument, as my mother told me
always to remember. We lived there until I was nearly seven years of age, and, although
so young, I can remember very vividly scenes and incidents which took place at that
time. We lived under the shadow of the old jail (near where Wall Street now runs), and
we children used to hear conversations not meant for small ears, between the prisoners
and the persons in the court who came there to see them.
All the land on which the North Union Station now stands, with the railway lines
connected with it, and also the site of many of the streets, particularly Lowell Street, was
then a part of the Mill-pond, or was reclaimed from the Bay. The tide came in at the foot
of Leverett Court, and we could look across the water and see the sailing vessels coming
and going. There the down-east wood-coasters landed their freight; many a time I have
gone "chipping" there, and once a generous young skipper offered me a stick of wood,
which I did not dare to take.
In 1831, under the shadowy of a great sorrow, which had made her four children
fatherless,– the oldest but seven years of age,–my mother was left to struggle alone; and,
although she tried hard to earn bread enough to fill our hungry mouths, she could not do
it, even with the help of hind friends. And so it happened that one of her more wealthy
neighbors, who had looked with longing eyes on the one little daughter of the family,
offered to adopt me. But my mother, who had had a hard experience in her youth in
living amongst strangers, said, "No; while I have one meal of victuals a day, I will not
part with my children." I always remembered this speech because of the word "victuals,"
and I wondered for a long time what this good old Bible word meant.
My father was a carpenter, and some of his fellow-workmen helped my mother to open a
little shop, where she sold small stores, candy, kindling-wood, and so on, but there was
no great income from this, and we soon became poorer than ever. Dear me! I can see the
small shop now, with its jars of striped candy, its loaves of bread, the room at the back,
where we all lived, and my oldest brother (now a "D.D.") sawing the kindling-wood
which we sold to the neighbors.
That was a hard, cold winter; and for warmth's sake my mother and her four children all
slept in one bed, two at the foot and three at the head,–but her richer neighbor could not
get the little daughter; and, contrary to all the modern notions about hygiene, we were a