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In the 1890s, the South emerged as the center of U.S. textile manufacturing; not only was cotton grown locally in the South, it had fewer labor unions and heating costs were cheaper. By the mid-20th century, all of the New England textile mills, including the Lowell mills, had either closed or relocated to the south. [1]
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 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 ...
However, as textile production in the United States shifted away from New England, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company's fortunes reversed. The company was able to survive the Great Depression due to military contracts and awards which revamped the surrounding economy; it was among the last of Lowell's textile giants to close.
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 ...
Lowell attracted both immigrants from abroad and migrants from within New England and Quebec (including a large proportion of young women, known as Lowell mill girls) who lived in the dormitories and worked in the mills. The textile industry in New England experienced a sharp decline after World War II and by the 1960s, many of the Lowell's ...
The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as America's first factory. The earliest buildings on the site have been designated a National Historic Landmark. Though many mills existed before the Boston Manufacturing Company, Francis Cabot Lowell's mill was the first to combine all steps of cotton fabric manufacturing under ...
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.