building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

A large number of works and investments followed in the wake of the site choice,
which made the original agricultural settlement, named Chelmsford, all the more
suitable for textile production. In 1793, work began to construct the Middlesex
Canal. Completed in 1804, it enabled the River Merrimack to be linked at
Chelmsford with the port of Boston. In 1797, the 1.5 mile‐long canal to bypass the
Pawtucket Falls was completed. In 1801, the first carding machine of the region was
installed. In 1813, the first cotton mill was built on the River Concord, a tributary of
the Merrimack, with an investment of 2,500 dollars 162 . However, the town
landscape was transformed, thanks to the ideas of Francis Cabot Lowell (1775‐
1817), who together with Nathan Appleton (1779‐1861) and Patrick Tracy Jackson
(1780‐1847) had founded the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813. The Lowell
system, experimented by the so‐called Boston Associated 163 in the factory at
Waltham, Massachusetts (1814), envisaged the use of machines, which had been
improved by various devices and by the organisation of a rigorous assembly line.
The processes took place for the first time in a single building and the internal work
rules gave the women workers relief.
In fact, Lowell thought of using mainly female labour to optimise investments. The
mill girls were chosen specifically because women’s pay was much lower than
men’s. However, Lowell had also decided to offer a series of benefits, such as
housing, clothing, educational activities, a school, a newspaper written entirely by
women (the Lowell Offering), convinced that welfare and a series of on‐site
comforts could increase the workers’ interest in productivity.
On Lowell’s death in 1817, his associates named the town, which was the fruit of
their investments in the textile industries on the banks of the Merrimack, after him
in 1826. Investments based precisely on his system already applied in Waltham.
Between 1820 and 1821, Thomas M. Clark invested approximately 100,000 dollars
to purchase lands and to acquire the Locks and Canals Corporation. The following
162 This data is from MESERVE, Herry C., Lowell‐ an industrial dream come true, Boston, The National
Association of Cotton Manufactures, Massachusetts, 1923
163 The Boston Associated also included Abbot Lawrence (1792‐1855) and Amos Lawrence (1786‐
1852). They were a group of investors based in Boston, Massachusetts, to produce textile products
of cotton. The term Boston Associated was created by historian Vera Shlakmen in Economy History
of Factory Town, A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (1935).
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