Boott Cotton Mills Museum
The
journey through this miraculous historical scene began in the Weave Room. It was filled with hundreds of massive,
extremely loud machines. It was an
overwhelming amount of noise as I walked through. Reading the small blurbs at the front, I
encountered a few facts that struck me as nearly unbelievable. Apparently, working in these rooms was a very
dangerous job to have. The fumes were
life-threatening, fatal accidents occurred on occasion, and the noise was, like
I mentioned earlier, overpowering. The
vibrations from these machines are so intense that they are in fact capable of
bringing down an entire building. This
is the reason they are most commonly seen on the first floor. Something that astonished me was the amount
of looms this single mill contained. The
Boott Cotton Mills alone contained 3,500 looms in 1910.
In
the next few rooms, I learned a great deal more from the pictures and the captions
accompanying them. The Constitution was
apparently promoting American industries and aiding the economy, which resulted
in American factories gaining additional “protection” from foreign competition. This was something I was unaware of. Something I had heard of but without great
detail was that a man named Samuel Slater, an immigrant from England,
established America’s first spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The fact that this was done in 1792 absolutely
amazes me. Someone could come up with
such a breakthrough concept that early, with the limited supplies that existed
back then is truly remarkable.
The
numerous steps that were needed to put cotton together impressed me as
well. Just to make something we so often
take for granted, people had to pick the cotton, “card” it, draw it out, then
make the strands into something known as “roving.” Afterwards, they would need to spin the
roving, dress it with a starchy solution, warp it and draw it in, and weave the
product of warping it. Finally, people
would tweave it and finally bale it, all just to make what we wear as shirts
every single day. How was this even
thought of? Who would think to put that
much work into it, or think to do those things to something picked from the
ground?
In
the final room, the park ranger had some interesting things to say. She reinforced an already known fact that
over the course of the city, the Merrimack River drops 32 feet, making this an
incredible geographical location for these mills. One thing I did not know that she said was
that the building we were standing in was “floating.” Not floating in the literal sense, but she
said that we were above water, held up by pillars, which I found pretty
interesting. Also, Lowell was famous for
using this water underneath them from the river more than once at a time with
their multi-tier factories. They built
multiple floors in the factories to gain maximum energy potential from the water. Lowell boosted the economy and tremendously
aided America in becoming an industrial power.
We were known for our cotton exports because of the Boot Cotton Mills in
Lowell. Eventually, however, other areas
caught on; the south began making it faster and more efficiently; other
countries began buying cotton from neighboring countries instead of us. In 1954 the Boot Cotton Mills were shut down
for the simple cause that they were no longer needed, and were not practical to
keep running anymore. It struck me as
ironic that something to important, something that revolutionized America, so
to speak, could be thrown away so easily.
Lowell helped put America on the map in the “industrial world,” and as
soon as other areas came across a better way to do things, Lowell was thrown
the side an fell into a very big slump for a long, long time. Luckily, as of recent years, Lowell is
showing its regrowth and is thriving to succeed and become as impressive as it
once was.
