Many inventions are associated with the industrialization of American

society, like interchangeable parts, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, railroads,

electric light, and power, telegraphs, telephones, and so on. Institutions
were invented too: modern corporations, factories, research laboratories,
and technical colleges. These may not seem like inventions in the normal
sense, but their creation and development marked the character and form
of an industrial society.

One of the first of these industrial cities in America was Lowell,

Massachusetts. With the formation of the American Republic at the end of
the eighteenth century, political and economic leaders in the United States
realized that the new nation needed to become self-sufficient in
manufacturing. Throughout the colonial period, Americans supplied
England with a variety of raw materials, including bar iron, naval stores,
and wood. American shipyards provided the British with both commercial
and military ships - one of the few areas of commercial endeavor in which
the American colonies provided a final product.

Cottage industries using a series of middlemen jobbers, were replaced by a

factory system. In this new system, workers came together in one place to
use textile production machinery powered by water wheels and steam
engines. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the first large industrial
cities such as Manchester and Birmingham the English landscape
dramatically and permanently. Hundreds of thousands of factory workers
labored in very unpleasant conditions, amidst the din and dim light of the
huge factory buildings, and lived in unpleasant, crowded slum-like
conditions.

The working conditions of the new British factory labor force created a
horrible specter of once-free men and women beaten down into a
permanent proletariat. new industrial cities turned out thousands of
pounds of manufactured goods which were being sold in expanding
national and international markets. Early attempts at American
manufacturing followed the British lead in the mechanization of textile
production. Through a combination of direct importation, industrial
espionage, and theft, English emigres and native Americans brought
together examples of the latest British spinning and weaving machines in
the United States ' first factories. In Massachusetts several various kinds of
manufacturing operations were established, using variations on the "put
ting out" system, or bringing together non-malized production into "houses
of industry.
A group of Boston businessmen, who had made money from the trade of
British and European goods into the United States and were cut off from
their suppliers following Thomas Jefferson's embargo of British goods in
1808, decided to invest their money in native American manufacturing.
This group, known as the "Boston Associates," was led by Francis Cabot
Lowell who toured England from 1810 to 1812 observing the mechanical
successes and social problems of the British factory system. Returning to
America, Lowell, his capitalist associates, and a native American mechanic,
Paul Moody, designed and built the Boston Manufacturing Company at
Waltham, Massachusetts, on the Charles River.

Boston Manufacturing Company decided to tackle one of the most difficult

technical problems facing both the Americans and the British: power
weaving. A power loom, run by a water wheel or steam, had proved to be an
elusive goal for the mechanics of 1800. With the Moody power loom the
Boston Manufacturing Company became the first example in America of
what is called "integrated manufacturing.”

Workers in Lowell's grand scheme were recruited because the sparse

population of Chelmsford could not provide the number of factory laborers
required. The first hundreds of workers required housing, supplies,
churches, banks, and entertainment. Near the mills, along an existing rural
route, a main street was laid out for banks, stores, a church, and soon a
railroad depot. It was all carefully planned, with architectural detail, and
anticipated expansion.

The Merrimack Manufacturing Company offered daily wages in hard cash,

a precious commodity for a rural economy still based largely on a barter
system. The "Lowell Mill Girls," were an enlightened group of factory
workers if there ever was one. These were good girls who only thought of
hard work and proper behavior. The companies reassured reluctant parents
with carefully supervised boardinghouses, strict rules, and just as carefully
cultivated self-governance through social peer pressure. Generally, these
women remained in employment for only a few years, earning money for
their families and themselves then left the mills for home, marriage, or
another career.

Eight large textile mills at Lowell by the mid-1830s had 116,804 spindles on
power spinning machines, 3,933 power looms with a labor force of 5,051
female operatives, 1,512 male workers each week processing 235,700
pounds of cotton, and 9,000 pounds of wool to produce 704,000 yards of
cotton goods, 43,270 yards of carpeting, and 6,000 yards of woolen
broadcloth and cashmere. Work days lasted twelve to fourteen hours. with
the introduction of machines with automatic shut-offs in the 1830s and
1840s, the job of most machine operators tended to be that of monitoring
the machine rather than controlling its operation.

The "mill girl" era lasted, at the latest, until 1850. By the 1850s immigrant
labor began to be employed. By the 1870s and 1880s, the workforce was
completely different: adult, immigrant, and permanent, with familial
responsibilities. Boardinghouses closed or became general rooming houses.
The mill girls, numerous as they were in the 1830s, were not the only
workers in Lowell. The mills and canals were built largely by Irish
immigrant day laborers who did not live in the orderly boarding houses.

As the Irish moved up the economic ladder, waves of new immigrant

groups - French Canadians, Polish, Italian, Greeks, and Eastern European
Jews - moved into the lowest-cost housing found only in the Acre. They also
moved into the mills, replacing the former mill girls, especially in the
decades following the Civil War.

The textile industry of New England moved south in the twentieth century.
The reasons are many, including inadequate investment in capital
equipment, higher union wages, lower textile prices, and aging buildings.
By the end of World War I, the textile cities of New England were becoming
grim scenes of closed mills and unemployment. Things were so bad in the
1920s that the Great Depression had little additional effect on the textile
towns. Except for some revival during World War II, mill towns like Lowell
continually suffer economic problems even today. During the late 1970s
and 1980s, Lowell staged a comeback based on high-technology industries,
mixed manufacturing,