The Company Town (3 page)

As foreign as the idea of founding a town in addition to a business may sound today, to the generations of early Americans, such a notion did not seem so outlandish. In 1791, for example, the nation's first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, was among the founding members of what would now be called a startup backed by venture capital: the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SEUM). Hamilton and his colleague Tench Coxe believed that a purely agrarian America, as championed by Thomas Jefferson and others, would always remain subordinate to Europe, easy prey for Continental bullying and manipulation. Spawning manufacturing in America, Hamilton believed, would require various tactics, including pilfering Britain's technological advances. Another key ingredient: the construction of a manufacturing hub—a town
where goods from sailcloth to stockings, blankets, and beer might be produced. Investors in the town's enterprises would benefit from both the sale of such goods and the rising value of the town's real estate. Looking for a site that combined affordable land, water power, and proximity to existing urban centers, the Treasury secretary and his colleagues decided upon an area near the Great Falls of the Passaic River in New Jersey. It would be named Paterson, in honor of that state's governor.

In little over a year, Paterson had begun to take shape, with the SEUM's directors giving the go-ahead to construction of a textile mill and textile-printing plant, spinning and weaving operations, and worker housing. The founders retained Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the architect who had just laid out the plans for the nation's new capital, to compose a similar plan for Paterson. But the stars were not favorably aligned: The spinning, weaving, and printing operations commenced, but L'Enfant's plan proved both too ambitious and somewhat misguided, and soon he withdrew from the field. By 1796, the New Jersey project had been abandoned. But it was a workable idea—as the revival of the development in the 1840s would prove, after which Paterson became an industrious mill town.
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The period was also rife with technical and engineering marvels that seemed to encourage the most high-flown visions of what was possible. The stream of inventions ranged from Eli Whitney's cotton gin and weapons made with interchangeable parts to Oliver Evans's highpressure steam engine and Robert Fulton's steamboat. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825 and linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, seemed to demonstrate that no geographic hurdle was too great to defeat modern engineering prowess.

On the frontier, land developers appealed to investors, offering to let them in on the ground floor of what were certain to be metropolises in years to come. Many who were drawn into these schemes got skinned, as they discovered that their newly purchased plots of ground were in fact plots of swamp. But urban centers from Detroit to Cincinnati and Indianapolis did demonstrate astonishing growth. St. Louis, home to 3,500 souls in 1818, ballooned to 6,000 in 1830. Over the same period, Louisville, Kentucky, doubled in size, while Cincinnati's population almost quadrupled, from 6,493 to 24,831.

In 1820, the country contained only five cities of note: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New Orleans. By 1870, these would be joined by St. Louis and Chicago, while forty-five other cities with populations between 25,000 and 250,000—including San Francisco, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and others—grew up in their shadow.
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With the nation exhibiting that sort of urban growth, who was to say that entrepreneurs shouldn't build their own towns along with their factories?

It took two years to get the new Merrimack River textile center up and running. Kirk Boott became the primary architect of the project. An unusual character, in one existing portrait now at Lowell's city hall, the handsome, dark-haired oligarch appears half-smiling, as if privy to some secret between him and the painter—at his ease but also eager to tackle the bundle of documents that lie on a table near his right hand. Harriet Robinson, a millworker who later compiled a memoir of her time in Lowell, recalled: “Boott . . . was a great potentate in the early history of Lowell, and exercised almost absolute power over the mill-people. He was not popular, and the boys were so afraid of him that they would not go near him willingly, for many of them had known what it was to have his riding-whip come down on their backs.”
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Haughty and dictatorial, Boott was born in the United States but went to Britain to attend school at Rugby and military college at Sandhurst. He bought a commission in the British army, served under Wellington in the Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon, and returned to the United States only when his unit was about to be sent to America to fight in the War of 1812. He was unemployed when he was hired by Appleton and the others to become treasurer of the nascent project.

Boott applied his engineering skills: laying out streets and designing the mills and boardinghouses, recruiting thirty Irish laborers for construction, and overseeing the building. It was determined that the Merrimack mills would be situated so as to benefit from the whole of the thirty-foot falls. The Pawtucket canal, not much used for years, was enlarged to become a feeder for yet-to-be-built power canals, and a new
canal connecting it to the river was built. Thus the area where mills were built was bounded on one side by the Merrimack River and by a series of canals on another.

Legal provision was made allowing the Merrimack Co. to utilize the patented machinery of the Boston Manufacturing Co. Another early consideration for the town: a church for the mill employees and other citizens, since the new village's residents could not be allowed to become as heathenish as Europe's degraded proletariat. Jackson and Boott were appointed to erect a suitable house of worship “built of stone and not to exceed $9,000 in cost.” As Boott was an Episcopalian, he deemed that St. Anne's Church would be of that denomination, regardless of the preferences of any who might attend. An additional $500 was dedicated to establish a circulating library.

The Merrimack Co.'s first water wheel was set in motion in September 1823. The moment prompted in the generally unsentimental Boott something akin to a worshipful response. “After breakfast, went to the factory and found the wheel moving round his course, majestically and with comparative stillness,” he wrote in his diary. Honoring the spirit of the enterprise, the founders felt the settlement needed a new name. The Anglophile Boott wanted it to be Derby. Appleton—the proper gentleman, respectful of his elders—overruled him: It would be Lowell, Appleton dictated, in honor of the Boston Manufacturing Co.'s founder.
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Waltham had manufactured cheap cloth that competed well against imported British fabric. The Merrimack Co. focused on a more expensive fabric, printed calicoes. The product was an immediate success, and the Boston Associates followed up by further expanding the town. All of the land and water power not being used by Merrimack was sold to the Locks and Canals Co. in 1824—a company that was owned by virtually the same group of capitalists, the Boston Associates. But the Locks and Canals Co. would serve as the town-development mechanism, selling land, leasing water power rights, and constructing mills, boardinghouses, and textile machinery for new firms.

Shortly, multiple new firms emerged and built mills on the Lowell site: the Hamilton Corp. (1825), the Appleton and Lowell corporations (1828), the Suffolk, Tremont, and Lawrence corporations (1830), the
Middlesex Corp. (1831), the Boott Corp. (1835), and the Massachusetts Corp. (1839). The Lowell Machine Shop, headed up by Moody and incorporated as an independent entity in 1845, designed and constructed machinery for the plants, and ultimately locomotives, turbines, and steam engines. Although the corporations' boards consisted mostly of the same men, creating new companies allowed fresh capitalization and a slow expansion of the circle of key players. Meanwhile, interlocking directorates ensured concentrated power and allowed policies to be coordinated: The companies would pay identical wages (and simultaneously announce wage cuts) and have identical working hours and regulations for their operatives. Their management structures—with the treasurer as chief officer, the agent as the on-site chief (Boott assumed both of these roles for Merrimack, but thereafter they were filled by two persons), a superintendent overseeing production in the various departments, and a clerk who managed accounts—were identical. And they marketed their cloth via the same Boston commission houses.

The textile firms were hugely profitable, as was the Locks and Canals Co., which averaged annual profits of 24 percent from 1824 to 1845. The mills built in the 1830s were redbrick affairs, four to six stories high with regular rows of windows, each “capped with a little white belfry,” in the words of visitor Michel Chevalier. There was plenty of light inside but little circulation of air, since companies nailed the windows shut to maintain the humidity the fabric needed. Like college dormitories, the mills were grouped around landscaped quadrangles, and as anyone who visits Lowell today realizes, they were built to last. Like America's political Founding Fathers, Lowell's builders seemed to feel they were setting up institutions that would last many lifetimes.

Different operations occupied different floors of the mill buildings, with the most basic tasks (carding and spinning, whereby the raw cotton was cleaned and drawn into yarn) near the bottom and the most skilled operations (dressing, or preparing the yarn for the weaving process, and weaving on power looms) occupying the top floors. By 1850, forty mill buildings lined the river for almost a mile, powered by six miles of canals and a system of gates and flow-measuring devices that regulated the water flow and diverted excess water back into the Merrimack. English-born engineer James Francis was a primary architect of the complex hydraulics—
valuable intellectual property that was in time marketed to the builders of other mill towns.

As the factories got ever larger over the course of the 1830s, the workforce soared to more than 10,000. Most workers lived in the boardinghouses, which stood close to the mills. Initially made of wood, in time they became imposing brick edifices that conveyed the solidity and benevolence of the enterprise, thus serving as a draw to workers and a reassurance to their families. Boott's imposing mansion stood, like the man, somewhat aloof yet nearby enough to allow him to keep watch. Less important executives lived in smaller but equally dignified dwellings.

The town's population ballooned from 2,500 at the town's incorporation in 1826 to 18,000 in 1836 and then to 33,000 in 1850, by which point it had become the second largest city in the state. A middle class appeared, occupied chiefly in supplying the needs and wants of the workforce. For these, separate zones arose in the town—areas of shops and middle-class housing the companies never sought to control. By the middle '20s, against the wishes of the class-conscious Boott, who felt that education was a frivolous indulgence for the working rabble, five schoolhouses had been completed. Twenty-six churches appeared in three waves of construction, with most completed by the mid-1840s. The poorest part of town was “New Dublin” or “the Acre,” home to hundreds of little shanties that housed the Irish construction workers who'd built the place.
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There were two distinct groups of employees in nineteenth-century Lowell. From the 1820s into the 1850s, workers came from the pool originally targeted by the Boston Associates: young Yankee women just off of farms in the surrounding area. But for various reasons, this labor pool was soon exhausted, and Lowell employers turned more and more to immigrant labor, first from Ireland and then from French Canada and elsewhere.

The early group of female workers drew a great deal of publicity and favorable attention to Lowell. In Appleton's words: “The contrast in the character of our manufacturing population compared with that of Europe has been the admiration of the most intelligent strangers who have
visited us.” And the visitors were not only intelligent, but they were celebrated and well-connected as well. Michel Chevalier, sent by the French government in 1834 to inspect U.S. public works but staying on to observe and write about the New World more generally, found the girls well-paid and a far cry from the European industrial workers who were afflicted by drunkenness and prostitution. Charles Dickens, after an 1840 visit, contrasted the place with Britain's “great haunts of desperate misery” and reported that he could not recall “one young face that gave me a painful impression, not one young girl whom . . . I would have removed from those works if I had the power.” The mill girls, he went on to say, had access not only to pianos and circulating libraries, but they also produced their own literary periodical, the
Lowell Offering
, filled with poems, essays, and stories of the mills and those who worked in them.