A Travel Guide To Historic Lowell, Massachusetts

Abandoned mills are about as inviting as abandoned mines . . . dark, dreary, even dangerous places that man ignores and time forgets. To visit them for pleasure is unthinkable - unless you've come to Lowell, 30 miles north of Boston. Here, over the past five years, sprawling, derelict, 19th century red-brick mills have become attractive havens of history, while the canals that once powered them have changed Lowell from an industrial blight to the Venice of New England.

In the mld-'70s, tourism was a trickle, chiefly art-lovers seeking the home of James Abbott Mc Neill Whistler. Today, tourism is a rushing river, with more than 560,000 visitors a year exploring the restorations and remains of 10 major mill complexes and a. sophisticated system of canals more than eight miles long, feeding off the Merrimack River. What's made the difference? Operating in Lowell since 1978 has been a unique, three-tiered management system, headed by the National Park Service's Lowell National Historical Park, established in 1978 to protect and recreate America's most successful mill community. And cooperating with the NFS are Massachusetts' Lowell Heritage State Park, responsible for preserving the canals and river banks, and a local effort dubbed the "Lowell Plan," assigned to attract developers skilled in adaptive re-use to the renovated mill sites.

Tourists might not care for the technicalities, but they care for the results - a series of mill, canal, trolley and walking tours that can occupy a weekend and take them back, easily and enjoyably, to the days when factories meant progress and profit, and mill towns meant Lowell, an industrial Utopia peopled with craftsmen and "mill girls," who earned more than teachers, lived in dormitories and, in the evenings, attended lectures by such literary lights as Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Lowell was born in 1821, when a group of cotton mill owners from Waltham, Massachusetts, on the wide and sluggish Charles River, discovered the Merrimack River provided superior water power, thanks to a 30-foot drop over Pawtucket Falls in the farming community of East Chelmsford. Mills soon replaced farms, just as East Chelmsford was renamed Lowell, to honor Francis Cabot Lowell, who sailed to Britain in 1810, memorized the fundamentals of that country's new power loom, then recreated the invention back in the U.S.

While such industrial spying may suggest a less-than-ethical character, Lowell displayed the highest ethics in designing a mill community with clean boarding houses under strict moral supervision. After his death in 1817, his associates maintained his programs, and progress continued unstinted. In 1850, Lowell mills were producing up to two million yards of cotton cloth each week. In 1898, production yielded 50,000 miles of fabric, enough to wrap around the world twice. And, in the early days, social conditions attracted authors, economists and reformers, eager to see how industrialization and humanization could function side by side.

The mighty mill complexes did it all - cleaning, spinning, weaving, printing, dying, storing and, finally shipping out bolts of cotton to markets all over the world. In fact, they did it all too well. Success bred competition, competition glutted markets, mill owners mandated longer hours and lower pay to keep prices in line, mill girls were replaced by immigrants, boarding houses were replaced by tenements and, after World War I, New England cotton mills were replaced by Southern mills. One by one, the old mills closed. In 1940, only three of the original 10 companies remained. In 1959, the last original mill, operated by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, shut down forever.

This was the sad situation when the National Park Service arrived. The situation arriving tourists find today is far from sad. A two-hour mill and canal tour includes barge rides on the Merrimack River and Pawtucket and Northern canals, with stops at the restored Guard Locks, which regulated water flow in the canals, and the Northern Canal Gatehouse and Merrimack Dam. Two surprises on this tour: Mill canals were clearly used as power-providers, not for pleasure transportation as they are now, and the Merrimack has come a long way since the days when it was known as one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the country. According to area residents, even the North Atlantic salmon is coming back.

For the best look at the mills themselves, take the mill and trolley tour, which "explores the mid-19th century Boott Mill, closed in 1946. Building No. 6 is now National Park Service property and, when it opens fully to the public next year, will display 60 looms, together with working exhibits and museum presentations on water power, labor and other industrial themes. Other Boott complex properties .on view are the 1835 Counting House, containing exhibits telling the story of cotton cloth manufacturing in Lowell, and the Boott Mill Dormitory, the only Lowell dormitory to survive.

Other mill-related activities include performances of mill-era songs and anecdotes - many of them plaintive, utopia or no - by musician Alex Demas, and tours of the Lowell Heritage State Park's water power exhibit, located across the street from the National and State Parks Visitors Center at 246 Market Street, in the restored Market Mills Complex. All tours are free, and guides deftly combine history with humor. Youngsters will love the barge and trolley rides, and adults will never again take for granted a yard of cotton cloth, or the memory of the mill workers who made it. And for accommodations, one choice is preeminent: multi-million dollar Lowell Hilton, contoured to look like a mill, stands on the site of the burn-out Middlesex Mill and faces a complex of canals and locks opened primarily to serve business clients.

Sources:
Stanton, Cathy The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City 2006

Weaver, David Sustainable Tourism 2005