By 1836, the Lowell mills employed six thousand workers. By 1848, the city of Lowell had a population of about twenty thousand and was the largest industrial center in America. Its mills produced fifty thousand miles of cotton cloth each year.
What did the factories in Lowell Massachusetts produce?
Francis Cabot Lowell and his circle of Boston friends were the first to improve upon the design and organization of the early New England textile mills. Lowell’s Boston Manufacturing Company was producing cloth by 1815, utilizing power looms he had developed after observing similar machines in British factories.
Why were Lowell textile mills successful?
At Lowell’s mill raw cotton came in at one end and finished cloth left at the other.” What is this? This Lowell System was faster and more efficient and completely revolutionized the textile industry. It eventually became the model for other manufacturing industries in the country.
What were the Lowell factories and who worked there?
The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35.
What would you have seen in the factories in Lowell?
What would you have seen in the factories in Lowell? The factories had over 10,000 looms and 320,000 spindles powered by waterwheels. They produced nearly a million yards of cloth a week. The cloth was made of cotton.
What is Lowell Massachusetts known for?
The city became known as the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution because of its textile mills and factories. Many of Lowell’s historic manufacturing sites were later preserved by the National Park Service to create Lowell National Historical Park.
What jobs did the Lowell girls have?
Most of the women who came to Lowell were from farms and small villages. Some had labored in small textile mills. Others had produced cotton or woolen goods or shoes for merchants who employed men and women in their homes and paid them by the pieces they produced.
What was life like for a Lowell mill girl?
Difficult Factory Conditions
These women worked in very sub-par conditions, upwards of 70 hours a week in grueling environments. The air was very hot in these rooms that were full of machines that generated heat, the air quality was poor, and the windows were often closed.
What was mill life like?
Most millhands went to work early in the day and labored for ten to twelve hours straight, amid deafening noise, choking dust and lint, and overwhelming heat and humidity. Families usually began mill work together, since employers paid adults poor wages and offered jobs to children to help make ends meet.
Why were the Lowell Mills important?
In the 1830s, half a century before the better-known mass movements for workers’ rights in the United States, the Lowell mill women organized, went on strike and mobilized in politics when women couldn’t even vote—and created the first union of working women in American history.
Why did mill owners hire female workers?
Lower Wages and Poor Working Conditions
One reason that the factory owners liked to hire women was because they could pay them less. At the time, women made around half of what men made for doing the same job.
What did Lowell combine in his factories?
The Lowell System
For the first time in the United States, these mills combined the textile processes of spinning and weaving under one roof, essentially eliminating the “putting-out system” in favor of mass production of high-quality cloth.
What was the job of a mill girl?
The job of the Mill Girls was to turn cotton into fabric. They operated fabric-weaving machines called looms. The women often worked for 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. And back then, there were no safety rules.
What was a factory girl?
Girls made up an important part of the factory workforce. They could be found changing bobbins on spinning frames, working in silk factories, and painting watch faces. Young girls often worked as spinners or bobbin girls.
What did mill girls do in their free time?
Free time could be taken up by numerous hobbies, such as writing letters to family and friends, going on walks, shopping, or pursuing creative projects. The girls would often go on outings as groups, especially to church on Sundays.
What did mill workers eat?
Well, the workers in the mill, on weekdays, on working days, would eat dried beans which they would cook with a piece of fat back meat, and these would be: pinto beans, pink beans, white beans, black eyed peas would be the main ones.
What did mill workers do?
The spinning room was almost always female-dominated, and women sometimes also worked as weavers or drawing-in hands. Boys were usually employed as doffers or sweepers, and men worked as weavers, loom fixers, carders, or supervisors. Mill workers usually worked six twelve-hour days each week.
What are mill workers?
A mill worker or sawyer processes timber products in a mill. A mill worker can perform a variety of tasks, including acting as a machine operator who cuts logs, strips bark, or performs other operations to prepare raw timber for sale or usage in building projects.
How long was a workday in the mills?
Factory workers regularly put in 12-hour days and 68-hour workweeks. By 1840 the workweek in the major mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts averages 74 hours.
Why did the Lowell girls protest?
The young female workers went on strike (they called it “turning out” then) to protest the decrease in wages and increase in rent. In 1898 Robinson published a memoir of her Lowell experiences where she describes the strike of 1836.