Lowell, MA news and local guide

Lowell was founded in the 1820s as a planned textile manufacturing center along the rapids of the Merrimack, 25 miles northwest of Boston. The Boston Associates, including Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson of the Boston Manufacturing Company, named it for their visionary leader, Francis Cabot Lowell, who had died five years before its incorporation in 1823. Many of the men who built its canals and factories were Irish immigrants escaping poverty and famine, while the mill workers, young single women known as Mill Girls, mostly came from New England farm families. The city grew by acquiring land from neighboring towns. By the 1850s Lowell had the largest industrial complex in the United States, weaving cotton grown in the South. In 1860 it had more cotton spindles than all eleven future Confederate states combined, and much of its coarse cloth went back south to clothe enslaved people; the historian Sven Beckert notes that "Lowell" became a generic word among the enslaved for such cloth. Sources Wikipedia: Lowell, Massachusetts