The Industrial Revolution
Optional audio recording of the text on this page.
Industrial Revolution.mp3"All was expectancy. Changes were coming . . . nobody could guess what."
Vocabulary
A Note on Language: We use the terms “mill” and “factory” interchangeably, as people did throughout the nineteenth century. Mills (or factories) were large complexes of buildings, each with its own purpose but all dedicated to producing something, such as textiles (cloth). Lowell's mill complexes included a counting house where mill managers worked, picker houses where cotton bales were broken open and brushed out, and worker housing (boardinghouses).
Industrial Revolution: A period in history (the early 19th century in the United States) when huge changes took place in how people worked and how things got made. Items that used to be made on family farms were made in huge quantities by machines in large factories.
Mass produced: Made in large quantities.
Cloth/Textile: Material made from wool, cotton, or other fibers, used to make clothes.
Merrimack River: A river that runs south from Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, through Massachusetts, and into the Atlantic Ocean in Newburyport. The river played a vital role in the development of Lowell.
Pawtucket Falls: The waterfall on the Merrimack River in Lowell that provided the power to run the factories.
New England: A group of states in the northeastern part of the United States, including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a time of great change that started in Great Britain in the late 1700s. Goods that had been made by hand were mass produced on machines in factories. Machine-made cotton cloth was one of those products.
In Lowell, the Merrimack River and Pawtucket Falls, a thirty-foot-high waterfall, provided the perfect place to build cotton textile mills. In the 1800s factories used the kinetic energy of falling water to run machines. The first mill opened in 1823, and within 25 years ten mills operated in the city. In 1848, Lowell was the largest industrial center in America. Fifty thousand miles of cotton cloth — enough to circle the world twice — was produced in the city that year.
People create machines to simplify work, but machines require people to run them. In Lowell, the cloth-making machines required a lot of workers. The mill owners decided to recruit a workforce of young women from New England farms.
In the following pages, learn about what it was like for the young women who left their farms to work in Lowell, becoming mill girls!