Lowell Heritage State Park |
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HISTORIC TOURS
Lowell, MA
Lowell is the nation's only urban state park. Built on the backs of immigrant
labor, the great brick mills still dominate the city. Lowel'''s network of museums,
unlike most, tell the tales of working class Americans. Restored and working machinery,
exhibits and live presentations remind many of us how our families first experienced
"the American dream",
Lowell Heritage State Park
500 Pawtucket Blvd
Lowell, MA
(978) 369-6312
Visit the official web site
For those millions of Americans descended from immigrant factory workers, Lowell
can be a moving experience. Many New England towns are still dominated by red
brick factories, but it all started here. Lowell was the dream city, designed
in the 1820s to be the perfect high-tech experiment. Women from local farms were
the original skilled weavers in what became the largest textile mills in the world.
But the experiment went awry. Owners pushed for faster machines, then more machines
per worker. Women textile workers were replaced by unskilled immigrant laborers
who worked for tiny wages over long hours six days a week. The Irish were first,
then Rusians, Prussians, Italians, French Candaians, Greeks, Poles, Turkish and
Bulgarian refugees and more. Children 14 and younger worked in the loud and dangerous
mills, side by side with their parents, and lived in crowded tenaments rented
to workers by factory owners. It was a pattern repeated throughout New England.
Today Lowell is a state park in the middle of a city. We visited recently during
the excitement of the annual ethnic folk festival. Arriving at the visitors center
we watched the long-surviving orientation slide show -- still impressive. Visitors
can take an electric trolley to a number of downtown museums. Step inside the
boarding houses where thousands of mill girls, then immigrants, got their start.
One complete section of the mill is still standing, transformed into a museum.
The looms still hum amid well-designed displays.
Upstairs in the museum haunting wax figures, including a man in thick glasses
and a red sweater, show how the mills have been adapted to moden companies. Outside
ethnic dancers pose along the canal that once powered the massive mills. Nearby
visitors lounged before a massive steel stage as musicians from a dozen nations
played. Policeman on horses monitored the crowds of guests.
Working to re-invent itself, Lowell has become a memorial to the people who struggled
through the harsh life the city once fostered. It is an amazing rebirth in a fascinatingly
diverse new city with a very American past and a million stories to tell. -- JDR.
ALSO IN LOWELL a Passaconaway Memorial
All photos (c) SeacoastNH.com/ J. Dennis Robinson
CONTINUE THE TOUR
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TEXTILE MILLS TOUR
All photos (c) SeacoastNH.com/ J. Dennis Robinson
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