What was lowell massachusetts

By , the mills in Lowell where turning out almost a million yards of cloth a week! Lowell, in , was the first town in the United States to get telephone numbers just three years after Alexander Graham Bell had patented his telephone.

Figure 5. Jack Kerouac Most Famous Book. Lowell is the birthplace of Jack Kerouac March 12, — October 21, As the author of, On the Road , and several other books, he is considered a literary iconoclast and alongside William S.

Augustin Thompson in Lowell, Massachusetts. Thompson claimed that it contained an extract from a rare, unnamed South American plant which is now known to be gentian root. By he was selling Moxie both in bottles and in bulk as a soda fountain syrup. In , he received a trade mark for the name. Thompson died in Moxie was purchased by the Coca-Cola company in Our Executive Director John Verrill is a big fan of the stuff.

These young women experienced economic independence that was unknown before the development of the Lowell mills. They likely had more ready cash than their farmer fathers. Their hours were shorter during the winter months, but the working conditions were dusty and dangerous throughout the year. Figure 8. Work Schedule at the Lowell Mills. The Lowell mill girls were not hesitant to express their opinions about working conditions and wages in the mills. The first protest came in just about a decade after the mills opened.

Subsequent protests and strikes followed resulting in the organization of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. The LFLRA is noted as being the first organization of working women to come together and bargain collectively for better working conditions and higher pay.

The author was probably Harriet Jane Farley, a mill girl who eventually became editor of the Lowell Offering. The operatives are well dressed, and we are told, well paid. They are said to be healthy, contented, and happy. This is the fair side of the picture. There is a dark side, moral as well as physical. Of the common operatives, few, if any, by their wages, acquire a competence.

The bills of mortality in these factory villages are not striking, we admit, for the poor girls when they can toil no longer go home to die. The average life, working life we mean, of the girls that come to Lowell, for instance, from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, we have been assured, is only about three years.

What becomes of them then? Few of them ever marry; fewer still ever return to their native places with reputations unimpaired. By , less than 50 years after their establishment, the mills in Lowell were annually producing enough cloth to circle the earth twice! Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in , but in , the first city to use telephone numbers was Lowell.

The 5. The soft drink, Moxie was invented as a medicine in Lowell in and claimed to cure paralysis. Lowell's downtown is part of the Lowell National Historical Park, established in as the first urban National Park in the country. Later, the Middlesex Canal created a direct water route from Middlesex Village, just upstream of East Chelmsford, to Boston by a system of locks and aquaducts between the Merrimack and Mystic rivers.

Manufacturing began to take root at about this time. Local manufacturing was greatly stimulated by the Embargo and the War of , which disrupted normal commerce and forced the local population to supply more of their own needs, especially cloth. After the War of , British goods again became easily available and some small manufacturers were driven out of business.

Others decided to make greater use of power machinery and expanded their operations. The community was incorporated as a town in and named Lowell after Jackson's partner. In , Jackson obtained a charter for a railroad to connect Lowell with Boston.