Lowell, MA - Boott Cotton Mills Museum

Salisbury, MA - Events of Saturday, August 3, 2013

On Friday, we headed south to a new destination in Salisbury, MA where we stayed at Beach Rose RV Park. Salisbury is about an hour north of Boston. Since we couldn't find a campground we liked closer to Boston, and since we don't like to stay too close to big cities anyway, we planned to take several day trips from Salisbury to see the sights around the northern side of Boston.

Beach Rose RV Park has about 40 full hookup sites, and we think they all have 30/50-amp electric. The roads and pads are paved, but the pads are a little too short to fit both axles of longer motor homes. The sites and the roads are narrow, so backing in can be tricky, especially with tow and towed vehicles parked along both sides of the road. However, the owner of the campground is very experienced in directing even the most novice RV driver into the sites.

There is free cable and free Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi was fairly fast, and the the signal was fairly strong most of the time. Although it did fade out once and a while, the Wi-Fi certainly was usable. It's a good thing because the Verizon signal (both voice and data) faded out a lot. The campground is about halfway between town and the beach, so it must also be between cell towers.

The sites on the western side of the campground are quite short. The ones in the middle are short, too, but they are a good bit wider than all the rest of the sites. We were originally assigned a site on the western side, but there was no way to get satellite on that side, even with a tripod. The elevation angle is so low this far north that even relatively short trees are a problem. These trees were very tall and completely blocked the sky to the southwest. Fortunately, after the owner made two trips back to the office, he was able to do some shuffling and move us to the eastern side of the campground. On that side, we had a good shot at the satellite. We were able to lock on with our rooftop dish and didn't even need to get out the tripod.

Our site at Beach Rose RV Park

View looking down the road from our site

We usually don't sightsee on weekends, but found a lot of things of interest on this stop, so we headed to Lowell, MA on Saturday. Lowell was founded in the 1820s by wealthy investors from Boston as a manufacturing center for textiles. Lowell, MA was a key factor in the industrial revolution in the United States.

The patenting of the cotton gin in 1794 by Eli Whitney greatly expanded the availability of cotton. With the cotton gin, a team of a couple of slaves could man the gin and clean the seeds from the same amount of cotton as it would take scores of slaves to do by hand. The immense increase in the availability of cotton brought about a demand for faster ways to convert the cotton into finished cloth.

The availability of abundant water power in the north made it an ideal location for the factories that would do the finishing of the cotton. In fact, the location for Lowell was chosen because it was on the Merrimack River at a spot where the river drops 32 feet over a distance of about a mile. The drop in water level provided water power for the mills. The fact that the site was only 25 miles from Boston was a bonus.

There was already a transportation canal at Lowell that was used to transport logs around the rapids. The Boston investors bought up the rights to that canal and built a whole system of canals to transmit water power throughout the city. Lowell has the world's largest system of power canals totaling 5.6 miles in length capable of producing an estimated 20,000 horsepower.

The system of canals in Lowell enabled the building of factories all over the city, not just on the riverfront. Today, Lowell is covered with multi-story brick buildings that used to house textile factories. Many of the buildings have been converted to loft apartments, condos or office space. The buildings of the old Boott Cotton Mills have been restored by the National Park Service and house the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, and that was our first destination of the day. Boott Cotton Mills Museum is part of the Lowell National Historical Park and is operated by the National Park Service.

The Lowell National Historical Site is spread out in several locations throughout the city. There is a hard-to-find visitor center with free parking downtown located in a building that was formerly a factory called Lowell Mills. Our GPS found the correct street address for the visitor center, but there was no place to park nearby. Thanks to our smartphone and Google Maps, we quickly found the parking lot and entrance to the visitor center around the opposite side of the block.

There is a free trolley that runs about every half hour from the visitor center to the museum and to several other of the historical site locations. The trolley that we rode was originally from New Orleans.

Restored New Orleans trolley in Lowell

The the trolley clattered along at a speed of a brisk walk, but the ride didn't take that long because it is only 4 or 5 blocks to the museum.

Boott Cotton Mills Museum

Boott Cotton Mills is a complex of several buildings around a central courtyard. The museum is in the building pictured above. Admission to the museum is $6 ($4 for seniors) with a 50% discount for the America the Beautiful Pass.

Central courtyard at Boott Cotton Mills

Although there were several steps to prepare the cotton fibers, the primary activity was weaving. By the early 1800s, mechanized looms were being built to greatly speed this process. The rows of thread that run lengthwise in the cloth are called the warp, and the threads that run crosswise are called the weft (or woof). The loom raises and lowers alternating warp threads while the shuttle repeatedly passes back and forth across the machine each time the warp threads are raised and lowered weaving a single weft thread each time.

The loom in the photo below has a turret on the right side containing multiple shuttles. When the thread on one shuttle was spent, a new shuttle would automatically be rotated into position. This type of automation allowed one operator to run multiple looms.

Weaving loom from the early 1900s

On the first floor of the museum is a weave room where there were originally over 100 looms. Boott Mills had a total of 3,500 looms in 1910.

Weave room

Even though only a handful of the looms in the weave room were operating (and even those few were not operating fully - only some parts of the machines were in motion), the clatter was deafening. We can't imagine how loud it was when there were 100 looms in full operation. The looms used to be located on the top floor; but there was so much vibration, they were afraid the building would shake apart so the looms were relocated to the ground floor.

Working conditions in the mills were very dangerous. There were no ear plugs or muffs for protection from all the noise, there was only minimal guarding of the moving parts of the machines to keep clothing or body parts from getting caught, and there were no respirators to protect lungs from all the cotton fibers in the air.

In the early days, a water wheel or turbine turned a main shaft. Belts then drove a series of overhead shafts, from which more belts drove individual machines. In the early 1900s, large electric motors were installed at the ends of the rooms to drive the overhead shafts and belts. In 1929-30, individual motors were installed on each loom.

On the upper floors of the museum there are displays of some of the other machines used for the cloth-making process. The machine in the next photo twists cotton roving into yarn. Roving consists of bunches of long fiber.

Throstle spinning frame used to make yarn

Carding machine used to separate and align cotton fibers prior to turning them into roving

Boott Cotton Mills was first incorporated in 1835. In 1840, Boott produced 155,000 yards of cloth. Throughout the 1800s, the weaving of cloth was a profitable, but highly competitive business. By 1905, Boot was producing 450,000 yards of cloth a week.

The mills of Lowell recruited young, single women from New England farms to work in the mills. Some of the women were looking for independence, but most were trying to escape the economic hardships of farm life. Right down the street from the museum is the company boarding house where the "mill girls" lived.

On the way to the boarding house, we passed Boarding House Park where the Lowell Museum of Fine Arts sponsors concerts on summer weekends. Since it was Saturday, there was a concert that evening, and dozens of people had already staked out their spots by leaving chairs and blankets on the grass in front of the stage. There was a sign stating that no chairs could be set up before 7:30 a.m.

Chairs and blankets placed in front of the stage at Boardinghouse Park to save places for the evening's concert

The mill girls were served three meals a day at the boarding house. Times and duration of the meals were determined by the mill management.

Boott Mills boarding house

Dining room

A female supervisor, called the "keeper," oversaw the boarding house. She was responsible for planning and scheduling the meals and for general management of the house.

Boarding house keeper's room

Typical mill girls' room

Lowell's success contributed to its undoing. The success brought competition, and competition reduced profits. The reduction of profits led to the cutting of wages, the increasing of work loads and the raising of rents in the boardinghouses. Strikes, labor disputes and work stoppages followed. Those disputes contributed to the hiring of Irish immigrants who were flocking to America in the late 1840s and early 1850s to escape the Irish Potato Famine. Following the Civil War, other immigrant groups went to Lowell to work. That reminded us of Pittsburgh's many ethnic neighborhoods that grew up around the steel mills back in the day.

By the 1920s, Lowell was in a tough situation. Many companies were relocating to the south to escape the high wage and benefit demands of the northern workers. In the 1930s, the Great Depression worsened Lowell's plight. Following the Depression, only three mills remained active, although some were reactivated during WWII to make fabric for parachutes. By 1960, however, all the major mills in Lowell had closed. Boott Cotton mills closed in 1954.

Following our tour of the boarding house, we caught the trolley back to the visitor center and the car, and we headed off to another museum in Lowell. We'll tell you all about it in our next post.