The association helped pass laws the limited working hours but the mills simply ignored the new laws.The Lowell system continued to fail when Irish immigrants, who started to flock to Massachusetts in 1846 to escape the famine in Ireland, sought work in the mills. Slater used the labor of local families while Lowell employed healthy young women, housed and fed at the company’s expense and paid wages in cash. Visitors to Lowell in the 1830s and 1840s repeatedly noticed the mills’ growing similarity to the feared English system and also the discrepancy between the original Lowell ideal and its second-generation reality.”In 1834, the mill cut the workers wages by 25 percent. He returned in 1813. Lunch was served throughout the year at 12:30pm.From May to August, the work day ended at 7pm, in September it ended at dark, from October to March it ended at 7:30pm and in April it ended at dark.After dinner, the employees attended lectures, formed groups aimed at self-improvement and attended church.

In his 1864 book, Samuel Batchedler contrasts Francis Cabot Lowell’s system with Samuel Slater’s Rhode Island system. Slater built small mills with a small number of spindles, while the mill at Waltham contained thousands of spindles and several looms watched over by hundreds of workers. That system was established at a cotton-spinning mill near Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790. One of the first steps in the shift to the factory system was cottage labor, in which unfinished materials were distributed to workers (usually women) in their homes, to be completed and returned to the manufacturer. He and Mr. Patrick T. Jackson, came to me one day on the Boston exchange, and stated that they had determined to establish a Cotton manufactory, that they had purchased in Waltham, (Bemis’ paper mill,) and that they had obtained an act of incorporation, and Mr. Jackson had agreed to give up all other business and take the management of the concern.”During Lowell’s trip to England, he toured the mills and memorized the design of the power looms. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35. Not only was it faster and more efficient, it was considered more humane than the textile industry in Great Britain by "paying in cash, hiring young adults instead of children, and by offering employment for only a few years and providing educational opportunities to help workers move on to better jobs".For the first time in the United States, these mills combined the textile processes of spinning and weaving under one roof, essentially eliminating the "Lowell solved the problem of labor by employing young women (usually single) between the ages of 15 and 35, who became known as "mill girls".

Reproduced by permission of the Cornell University Library, accession number 0033.60.17.526 in the 6896 G, Stevens Companies Graphics collection. Slater adhered to the old craft system while Lowell built labor-saving machines that required only a few weeks of training to master the repetitive tasks. These mill girls, as they were called, were required to live in company-owned dormitories adjacent to the mill and were expected to adhere to the rather strict moral code of conduct espoused by Lowell.
In Slater’s mills, which set the pattern for Rhode Island, the English plan for employing whole families, including children who were very young, was adopted, and it led to the bringing of families into the industrial centres that were wholly dependent upon the mills and that suffered severely when there was no work.

The exact hours the employees worked changed per season. Lowell’s industrial order ‘came to dominate the cotton industry [and] marked a radical departure from all that had gone before.


One of Lowell’s early leading labor reformers was a mill girl named Sarah Bagley. : B. H. Penhallow, Printer, 1851. Time table of the Lowell mills, to take effect on and after Oct. 21st, 1851. The mill girls responded by staging a strike and organizing a labor union called the Factory Girls Association. Because these workers tended to be married and have families, they didn’t live in the inexpensive company dormitories and instead lived in tenement housing.This reliance on immigrant workers slowly turned the mills into what they were trying to avoid: a system that exploited the lower classes and made them permanently dependent on the low-paying mill jobs.By the 1850s, the Lowell system was considered a failed experiment and the mills began using more and more immigrant and child labor.Textile manufacturing in New England started to decline in the 1890s when new technological advances made it easier and cheaper to manufacture textiles in the south, where cotton was grown locally, heating costs were cheaper and there were fewer labor unions.The mill’s owners decided not to modernize or update the Massachusetts textile mills and instead invested in building modern textile mills in the south.As a result, by the mid 20th century, all of the New England textile mills, including the Lowell textile mills, had either closed or relocated to the south.To learn more about the industrial revolution, check out my article on the Rebecca Beatrice Brooks is the author and publisher of the History of Massachusetts Blog.


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