Rock-Solid Lowell Is No Run-of-the-Mill Town

Flowing canals, sturdy architecture and a storied past make this Massachusetts mill town like few other cities.

Lowell, America’s first factory town, issued the battle cry that launched America’s Industrial Revolution. And though its gritty splendor is as unlike the pastoral majesties of Yellowstone or Yosemite as you can imagine, Lowell’s hard-working heritage has earned it a place alongside those natural wonders on America’s roster of national parks. The Lowell National Historical Park, along with the Lowell Heritage State Park, is a patchwork of sites scattered throughout the mill town.

Strange as the idea of a park devoted to work may seem, this industrial mill town may be more relevant to today’s urbanites than to a rolling plain freckled with bison. Like the new national park on New York City’s Ellis Island, Lowell, which joined the ranks of the national parks in 1978, is truly a people’s park.

Visitors to Lowell’s parks can pass through the locks of the city’s canals while on a breezy boat ride; chug from mill to mill in reproduced, turn-of-the-century trolleys, and stroll along a canal-side walkway to the menacing-looking industrial canyon with its dark, towering walls. Museums, tours and hands-on exhibits help visitors digest the hard facts and complex principles embodied in the city’s rise, fall and rebirth.

If the idea of visiting a mill city seems a dreary prospect, Lowell may surprise you. The town’s grid of flowing canals has prompted some egocentric locals to proclaim that Venice is merely the “Lowell of Italy.”

Hard by the banks of the Merrimack River, Lowell is no prom queen. Few would confuse its utilitarian beauty with graceful Venice.

There are no gondoliers in Lowell, only the silent brick smokestacks that cast their dark shadows across the brick mills that line rock-walled canals like fortresses. Here America began its transformation from a nation of farmers to a nation of workers.

The imposing mills, along with the ‘50s-feel of the downtown area and the urban vistas cracked open by a grid of canals, lend a thematic unity to this time-capsule town.

This may be the world’s most pyro-proof city. Every building, street and sidewalk is red brick or gray stone. Because the city was, in a sense, built as an investment, it was made to last. The rock-solid construction also symbolized power and prestige.

Lowell is no longer wealthy, but its empty pockets helped preserve the mills now recognized as the city’s greatest treasures; it costs money to demolish old mills and erect new buildings in their place.

A few mills fell to the wrecker’s ball during urban renewal in the ‘60s, but their destruction inspired a new-found appreciation for the city’s industrial architecture. Now folks pay to see it.

Most park tours cost a dollar or two, but in exchange for a couple of bucks you can cruise in a boat past the last operating textile mill--where synthetic fabrics are made to upholster Toyotas, Hondas and Fords. Supposedly, a third of the world’s auto upholstery is made here.

Continuing along a tree-lined, serpentine canal that seems more like nature’s work than man’s, the bargelike tour boat soon reaches Guard Locks. There it passes through the watery stairway linking the lower reaches of the Pawtucket Canal with the higher reaches of the Merrimack River.

Passengers pile out to ogle the locks’ workings and to view the Great Gate, a massive wooden barrier that has twice dropped like a guillotine to dam the canal and save Lowell from onrushing floodwaters.

Then it is on to the more man-made-looking canals that carried water power into Lowell. A display in the Suffolk Mill shows how it works: Water gushing through a tube spins moaning turbines linked to a huge, steel-spoked maple wheel that turns leather belts, which, in turn, power a Rube Goldberg-like assortment of smaller wheels driving the looms.

Once this was high-tech stuff. That high-tech tradition lives on. Upstairs are offices housing computer software development companies and the computer science division of the University of Lowell. Many other mills have been converted to housing or office space.

This fall, the newly renovated Boott Mill will open with a roomful of 90 operating looms to re-create the working environment of a century ago.

Back at the visitor center, you can stop at the Melting Pot, a food court where you can get Thai-style noodles, Greek souvlaki , a Mexican burrito, Chinese chop suey or a good old American hamburger.

The parks at Lowell are not the best place for a self-guided walking trip, hence the many ranger-led tours--the “Mill and Canal Tour,” the “Sunset Cruises,” the “Knapsack Tours” and the “What’s Under Our Hat” series. But plans are in the works to connect a series of walkways along the 5 1/2-mile network of canals. Pedestrians can already stroll some of the waterways, and anyone can take in a slide show about the Industrial Revolution in Lowell or stop at the various exhibits and museums.

The Spindle City literally burst into being in the early 1800s. By 1850, it had evolved from a trading post to an industrial giant of a city, the El Dorado on the Merrimack, a bustling metropolis of about 35,000.

It was the brainchild of Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston merchant whose trade with Britain was imperiled by war and pirates. Lowell traveled to England to examine--and memorize--the workings of the country’s water-powered textile looms. Upon his return, he built a mill on the Charles River at Waltham, but died soon after it proved successful.

His associates sought a site with more waterpower than the sluggish Charles River. The Pawtucket Falls, where the Merrimack River churns over a 32-foot drop, beckoned. A canal had already been built around the cataract to ease the transport of New Hampshire timber bound for Newburyport shipyards. Perhaps it could be adapted to the needs of industry.

A plan formed. The canal system was rebuilt and expanded, masons constructed gargantuan brick mills, each larger than a city block. As if stamped out by cookie cutters, the four- and five-story mills rose one after another, lined with rank upon rank of windows and looking bleakly uniform.

Clock towers were everywhere; a population changing from rural rhythms to machine-age punctuality needed constant reminding of time’s urgency. A city was born. It was named Lowell, after the man whose idea it was.

While the fabric factories were inspired by Britain’s model, the lifestyles of those who worked in them were not. The American entrepreneurs hoped to avoid the human horror of the Industrial Revolution in England--the child labor, the cruel working conditions, a working class all but enslaved. Their new enterprise would be a worker’s utopia.

Whether it was largesse or a desire to avoid a proletarian citizenry, the owners opted to staff their mills with New England farm girls (many of the region’s young men were headed West anyway). The idea was that young women could come to Lowell, live and work under wholesome conditions, help support their needy family or earn a dowry and, after a few years, return home enriched both monetarily and intellectually by the experience.

To persuade farmers to surrender their daughters, the burghers built handsome boarding houses, where the “mill girls” could live in a supervised, morally upright environment.

Charles Dickens, who knew a thing or two about the grim costs of industrialization, visited Lowell in 1842 and was nearly dumbfounded by the well-educated female workers who spent their leisure time playing the piano or engaging in literary pursuits.

Happy days in Lowell did not last, however. Other New England mill towns spun into being--Fall River and Lawrence, Mass., Saco and Manchester in New Hampshire. Competition changed the rules of the game. Lowell’s Golden Age began to fade.

The city’s most famous native son, “madman, bum and angel” Jack Kerouac, the seminal Beat Generation writer, is commemorated by a set of polished granite pillars near the Eastern Canal.

Kerouac, author of “On The Road,” blew out of town behind the wheel of a fast car and roared off across the country in search of fulfillment. His quest took him all over the United States, and to Mexico and Europe. But he always came home to Lowell, the factory town fit for a park.

GUIDEBOOK

Getting Around Lowell

Tours: Lowell National Historic Park and Lowell Heritage State Park offer a variety of summer tours. The most all-inclusive is the 2 1/4-hour “Mill and Canal Tour.” Other options include “Pawtucket Canal Tour,” “Mill and Trolley Tour,” “Sunset Cruise,” “Knapsack Tours” (evening foot or bike tours of canals and rivers, mills and mansions and the ethnic cultures of Lowell) and “What’s Under Our Hats” (ethnic neighborhoods, historic architecture, hydroelectric plants).

Some tours are free, others are $2 for adults or $1 for those 62 years and older. Children 16 and younger go free on all tours.

For more information: To get park programs or tour reservations, contact Lowell National Historical Park, 246 Market St., Lowell, Mass. 01852, (508) 459-1000. For information about Massachusetts, contact the Massachusetts Division of Tourism, 100 Cambridge St., Boston, Mass. 02202, (617) 727-3201.