Teaching American History - Day 3

Today was a long day at Lowell, Massachussetts, the site of the Bootts Cotton Mill factory complex that was in operation from the early 1820s until 1954.  Lowell was the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, providing the basic blueprint for both labor and owners in the early stages of American Capitalism.  The factory floor holds nearly 50 weaving machines, only about 20 of them were in operation so that we could get a sense of the noise that it might have sounded like when all 100 original machines would have been operating.

Remarkable to me was the re-invention of the factory over the course of nearly a century and a half.  Today, some parts of the complex have been converted into housing, while other parts have been modernized to provide space for businesses.  The Boarding House Commons is a large grass area fronted by a stage for annual concerts.  This would have been impossible in the past as the entire area was originally occupied by the boarding houses that the Lowell Girls (the young farming girls from as far away as 200 miles) who were the primary workforce in the 1800s.  When I compare the scene at Boott Cotton Mill with analogous delapidated factories strewn around the Bulgarian countryside which are to this day rotting away since the fall of the Soviet Union over 20 years ago, it is remarkable that there is the American re-tasking of industrial space to accomodate the needs of communities and of the economy large and small.  Although the Boott complex is profoundly institutional and almost prison-like in appearance, it is a remarkable space nonetheless for how it was used and reused over time, evolving to retain relevance to the community that brought it about.

Here is the raw footage from the factory floor showing the weaving machines at work.  You can see the drive trains and axles connected by leather straps spinning, all of this was initially run by water power (hence the canals), then by steam power, and now finally by electricity.  Note the vaporizers in the ceiling that are spraying the air to keep the room humid so that the cotton does not dry out and snap as it is manipulated by the machines.  Also note the speed with which the thread shuttle is zipping back and forth across the weaving providing the string.  Originally, these shuttles were moved across by hand, but with increasing mechanization, they were taken over by a simple spring-loaded gearing mechanism that allowed for far greater speed, up to 55 yards of cloth per day per machine (modern machines are about 1000 times more productive than these!).