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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