Lowell, Massachusetts

• 1. Introduction

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  Lowell, Massachusetts sits at a bend in the Merrimack River where the water drops 32 feet over a mile of rapids, and for most of American history, that fall of water determined the fate of hundreds of thousands of people. In 1860, Lowell held more cotton spindles than all eleven states that would form the Confederacy combined. That single fact captures something extraordinary about what this city once was. How did a farming community called East Chelmsford become the engine of American industry? How did it fall into ruin, then refuse to stay ruined? And what does it mean that, today, Lowell is home to America's second-largest Cambodian-American population? The answers trace a path from colonial fishing sites on the Pawtucket Falls to a 2022 mayoral election that made history.

• 2. Water, Power, and the Mill Girls

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  Before the first mill was built, the Pawtucket people fished the falls at the confluence of the Concord and Merrimack rivers. Their name for the location means 'at the falls' in the Massachusett language, and the falls that fed their seasonal harvest would, centuries later, feed the looms. The Boston Associates, including Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson of the Boston Manufacturing Company, saw those rapids as convertible energy. They founded their planned manufacturing center in the 1820s in the farming community of East Chelmsford, 25 miles northwest of Boston. They named it after Francis Cabot Lowell, their visionary leader who had died five years before the town's 1823 incorporation. The Pawtucket Dam was designed to turn the upper Merrimack into a millpond, diverting water through an extensive canal system that powered the looms. The workers who operated those looms were mostly young single women drawn from New England farm families and known as Mill Girls. The workers who built the canals themselves were largely Irish men escaping the poverty and Great Famine of the 1830s and 1840s. By the 1850s, Lowell had built the largest industrial complex in the United States.

• 3. Cotton and Coercion

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  The textile mills of Lowell wove cotton produced in the Southern United States, and the supply chain ran through slavery. Historian Sven Beckert has documented that 'Lowell' became the generic term enslaved people used to describe the coarse cottons produced there. Many of those coarse goods were shipped back south to clothe the very people whose forced labor had grown the raw cotton. The city's industrial peak came before the First World War. In the decades leading up to it, wave after wave of immigrants arrived to work the mills: Catholic Germans came first, then large numbers of French Canadians during the 1870s and 1880s, then other groups who settled into distinct ethnic neighborhoods. By 1900, nearly half of Lowell's population was foreign-born. The 1922 New England Textile Strike shut the city's mills over a proposed wage cut. Then, through the 1920s, companies began relocating to the South, and Lowell's manufacturing base contracted. By 1931, Harper's Magazine called the city a 'depressed industrial desert.' At that moment, more than one third of the population was on government relief, and only three major textile corporations remained operating.

• 4. Genocide, Refugees, and Cambodia Town

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  During the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, Lowell absorbed a large wave of refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge. The city, already experienced at absorbing displaced populations, became home to thousands of new Cambodian immigrants. By 2010, Lowell had the highest proportion of residents of Cambodian origin of any place in the United States, at 12.5% of the population. The Government of Cambodia recognized this concentration directly: on the 27th of April 2009, it opened its third U.S. consular office in Lowell, joining consular offices in Long Beach, California, and Seattle, Washington. In 2022, Lowell elected Sokhary Chau as mayor, the first Cambodian-American mayor in the United States. The most commonly reported ancestries in the 2020 census were Cambodian at 15%, Irish at 14.1%, and Puerto Rican at 11.1%. Little Cambodia, the neighborhood centered on that community, became a designated tourist destination beginning in 2010.

• 5. Rebirth and the Massachusetts Miracle

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  Wang Laboratories, the computer company, established its headquarters in Lowell in the 1970s and became the symbol of the city's industrial rebirth through the Massachusetts Miracle. At the same time, the former mill district along the river was partially restored and became the Lowell National Historical Park, founded in the late 1970s, with 5.6 miles of largely restored canals and exhibits including weave rooms and a waterpower display. Wang went bankrupt in 1992, but the city had already been building a parallel identity as a cultural center. Lowell hosts the Lowell Folk Festival, the nation's largest free folk festival, which draws an average of 250,000 people on the last weekend of July. By the 1990s, the city had built a new ballpark and arena, home to minor league teams including the Lowell Spinners, a Class A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. Between 1994 and 1999, crime in the city dropped 50%, the highest rate of decrease for any American city with over 100,000 residents.

• 6. Boxing, Kerouac, and Famous Birthdays

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  Arthur Ramalho's West End Gym is where Lowell's boxers have trained for decades. The New England Golden Gloves tournament is held annually in the city, and the tournament has featured fighters including Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Marvin Hagler. Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund both began their careers in Lowell; their story became the 2010 film The Fighter. Jack Kerouac was born at 9 Lupine Road in the Centralville section and is buried at Edson Cemetery at 1375 Gorham Street, where a monument to Chief Passaconaway also stands. Kerouac Park was placed in downtown in the mid-1980s, and the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival takes place each October. The city's Highlands neighborhood was also the birthplace of Bette Davis, at 22 Chester Street, and the Whistler House Museum of Art occupies the birthplace of painter James McNeill Whistler. Rosalind Elias, the opera singer, was born in the Acre neighborhood at 144 School Street.

• 7. Inventions and Firsts

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  In 1879, Lowell became the first city in the United States to use telephone numbers, two years after Alexander Graham Bell had demonstrated his telephone in Lowell. CVS/pharmacy was founded in Lowell in 1963, originally named the Consumer Value Store. Father John's Medicine, a cough syrup, was first formulated in a Lowell pharmacy in 1855. William Stickney Lamson of Lowell patented the Cash Carrier system in 1881. Moxie, considered the first mass-produced soft drink in the United States, also came from Lowell. Prince Spaghetti moved from Boston to Lowell in 1941; its plant became the largest pasta mill in the country, operating in the neighborhood locally known as Spaghettiville, before the company was sold to Borden in 1987 and the plant closed in 1997. Western Avenue Studios, at 122 Western Avenue, is now the largest complex of artist studios in the United States, with over 300 working artists and musicians occupying a converted mill.