The Company Town Read Online Free

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. 14
    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.” 15
    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. 16
    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