Spindle City

June 1993 marked the first anniversary of the opening of the Boott Cotton Mill Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the pounding of looms and the voices of workers who ran them can be heard once more.

The sprawling red brick buildings that cling to New England's riverbanks loom as a shadowy presence of my childhood. I remember driving past them on car trips, their endless rows of windows catching the afternoon light, a bell tower poking up here and there into the sky, buildings whose only purpose, as far as I could tell, was to provide wall space for giant, peeling billboard advertisements.

It wasn't until I visited the city of Lowell as an adult, two decades later, that I finally set foot inside one of these mysterious buildings. Last June, during the grand opening of the Boott Cotton Mill Musuem on the banks of the Merrimack River, I stood in the midst of nearly 100 working looms, row after row of meticulously restored Draper Model-E's. Flying shuttles, rocking harnesses, whirring belts -- the pounding was ferocious, like some gigantic percussive symphony. Even the earplugs I wore hardly dulled the racket.

This was the sound of industrial success. For more than a century it had filled the buildings of Lowell and New England's other mill towns, providing thousands of jobs and miles of cloth. It was the sound of America's transformation from a rural to an industrial society, and Lowell, once the biggest manufacturing center in the country, was at the center of the commotion for most of the 19th century.

Late in the 20th century, the echoes of Lowell's industrial era long-since silenced by years of economic depression, the

Boott Cotton Mill has opened its doors once more, not to hard-working laborers, but to the public. The museum's recreated weave room, the only one of its kind in the world, is an ear-splitting introduction to Lowell's National Historical Park.

Founded in 1978, and operated in conjunction with the Lowell Heritage State Park, the park draws people not for its beauty, but for its drama. As many as 750,000 people a year come to hear the story of Lowell -- a story of prosperity and decline, of good times and bad. Of technological innovation and punishing working conditions. Visitors ride turn-of-the-century-style trolleys along city streets, travel by barge through the canals, tour restored buildings full of exhibits. They come for a glimpse of America's industrial past that can be found nowhere else in New England.

"This is history from the bottom up," says Marty Blatt, the park's labor historian. "Usually when we study history, it's the history of the elite -- presidents, statesmen, financiers, industrialists -- figures of power or money. But here it's the history of the ordinary person, the working man and woman of America, that is remembered and acknowledged."

In the weave room of the Boot Mill the air is a blur of belts and pulleys. Shuttles shoot back and forth at 160 miles per hour. The floor vibrates beneath my feet. High above my head, giant wooden beams fit into the brick wall surrounded at both ends by six inches of extra space in order to accommodate the shaking and shifting caused by hundreds of working looms. I try to imagine this room heated to 90 degrees, the humidity at 90 percent to keep the cotton threads moist and strong. The air was so heavy with lint and dust that many workers suffered from "brown lung" disease. The noise was so bad, day after day, they learned to lipread, and most suffered from severe hearing problems.

Surrounded by the clattering, I read these words on a small plaque: "'I discovered . . . that I could so accustom myself to the noise that it became like a silence to me. I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.' Lucy Larcom, 1889. "

On another plaque I read the words of Josephine Baker, written in 1845: "You ask why we work in the mill? Because the time we do have is our own. The mony (sic) we earn comes promptly; more so than in any other situation; and our work, though laborious, is the same from day to day, we know what it is and when finished we feel perfectly free till it is time to commence again."

These are the words of the women who made the Golden Experiment on the banks of the Merrimack River a success. When Henry Cabot Lowell returned from England in 1811, having memorized plans for a mechanical loom that would power America's industrial revolution, he needed a workforce. New England men were busy working the farm or moving west. By hiring women, who would work for a year and then return to the farm or marry, Lowell hoped to avoid the creation of a permanent working class like he'd seen in England. He hoped to maximize profits while minimizing human misery.

Lowell didn't live to see the birth of the city that bears his name, but his wealthy friends carried on with his vision, best explained for park visitors in the artful multi-media presentation, "Lowell: the Industrial Revelation." The Boston Associates, as they were called, financed the mill buildings where, for the first time, the whole cloth-making process, from bale to bolt, was done under one roof. And their capital paid the wages of a new labor force. During the 1820s, women flocked to the Spindle City, eager to earn a wage and lured by the city's social and cultural opportunities. For a time, Lowell's experiment was indeed "golden."

But despite the advantages of the city, life was hard. In an exhibit of reconstructed rooms at the Patrick J. Mogan Cultural Center, visitors today can see how the mill girls lived, four or six to a room in gigantic boardinghouses. Working conditions were harsh: up at 4:30 for a 14-hour day on their feet with short breaks for meals. Their lives were regulated by the bell, morning, noon, and night, a whole city of women moving in unison. "Just like so many living machines," wrote one woman.

By the 1840s, Lowell's ten textile corporations were producing 50,000 miles of cotton cloth each year -- enough to circle the world twice. But success led to competition and, inevitably, to wage cuts. Worker protests began as early as 1834, and by the 1840s the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was calling for a 10-hour day. When its efforts proved fruitless and working conditions continued to worsen, many left, and mill owners hired Irish immigrants to take their places.

As the era of the mill girl came to an end, a new one began. The immigrants came in waves, searching for a better life -- first the Irish, then the French-Canadians, then the southern and of eastern Europeans. Worker exploitation and strikes became a way of life for these hard-working immigrants, some of whom stand stiff and unsmiling in photographs on display at the museum.

The one constant in Lowell, throughout the years of turmoil, was the great river. Indeed, if it weren't for the Merrimack, this industrial drama of America's history could never have been written. At Pawtucket Falls, where the Merrimack meets the Concord, the river drops 30 feet in less than a mile -- a continuous surge of kinetic energy from which the mills harnessed 10,000 horsepower. By 1850 nearly six miles of canals were driving waterwheels in 40 mill buildings, powering almost 10,000 looms. Horsedrawn barges transported cargo to the port of Boston along the complex system.

Today, visitors to Lowell travel the canals in wide flat- bottomed motor-powered barges. The water is smooth as black glass. On one side trees hang low. On the other, the back of a mill building rises straight up from the water's edge, casting a long shadow. The canal cuts past a parking lot full of school busses behind a huge chain link fence, then under a steel bridge. The sound of traffic is never far away.

But at the 1822 Guard Locks, the biggest one in the canal system, it is still the 19th century. Two burly lock tenders in muslin shirts throw all their weight against two giant red beams. Slowly, the gates inch open, and the towering cement walls of the lock disappear as water gushes in until the gates stand open wide and the boat passes through to the other side.

The story of Lowell gets told like this throughout the park -- bit by bit. Lock gates open. A turbine turns. A trolley rumbles along its tracks. Looms weave. The city that once manufactured cloth is now manufacturing its own history, telling a tale that began more happily than it ended. Even in the 1890s, mill owners knew their mills were aging, becoming increasingly noncompetitive. But instead of modernizing, they used profits from the Lowell mills to finance modern textile plants in the South.

Upstairs in the Boott Museum, the Decline Room chronicles the long years between 1924 and 1974. Against one wall stands an old loom, just like the ones pounding downstairs -- except that this one has not been restored. It is displayed just as it was found in an abandoned mill building, covered with 80 years of cotton waste, smeared with oil and grease. A worker's locker, empty except for a bent coat hanger, stands open in a corner. On the walls hang termination letters received by workers when the mills started closing.

I sit down on a small wooden bench in front of a television screen and suddenly I am looking at the images of old mill workers alone in cavernous brick rooms they once worked in, their faces worn and cracked as the walls. They are talking about the mills, about the heat and dirt, the grueling hours and low pay, but also about their skills and the pride they took in their work. And they are telling what it was like when the end came.

Antonio De Jesus, who spent 28 years of his life working in the mills, remembers the day a junk dealer came with a hammer and started smashing all the machinery -- bought it for junk. "This was like home to me for 38 years," remembers Regis Mannion. "It's like seeing your own home fall apart and you can't do anything about it."

There are other names, other memories: Narcissa Hodges, 47 years in the mills; Sidney Muskovitz, 29 years; Victor Sherburne, 16 years; Celia Thing, 21 years; Noel Rainville, 31 years. And there is Valentine Chartrand, who spent 54 years -- more than half a century -- on the floors of the mills: "What job did I like most? I really didn't like any of them, but I had to do it, and I did it."

As I leave Lowell, driving out past the mills, the red brick buildings have lost much of their mystery. I can hear the pounding of the looms, the rush of water through the locks, the turning of the turbine. But I hear also the voices of these workers and the mill girls before them. I hear their struggle and their determination. I hear Antonio DeJesus: ". . . that was my life," he said, "I made the best of it. . . ."