The Company Town Read Online Free Page B

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. 17

    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.
    Today the poetry and many of the tales in the Offering seem formulaic, derivative, and sentimental, but a glimmer of journalistic truth peeks through in the reflections on life in the factory and boardinghouses. An 1845 piece by Josephine L. Baker titled “A Second Peep at Factory Life” complains about pay cuts and “the practice of sending agents through the country to decoy girls away from their homes with the promise of high wages, when the market is already stocked to overflowing.” In “Almira’s” 1841 “The Spirit of Discontent,” two mill girls debate the virtues of life in Lowell versus that in the country—one asserts “I won’t stay here and be a white slave”—before agreeing that “since we must work for a living, the mill, all things considered, is the most pleasant, and best calculated to promote our welfare.”
    That magazine, which Dickens said “will compare advantageously with a great many English Annuals,” was the subject of favorable reviews in the Times of London and the Edinburgh Review . It also drew comment from Harriet Martineau, another English visitor and chronicler of 1830s American life, who effused about the boardinghouse arrangements and the operatives’ ample earnings, and noted that “all look like well-dressed young ladies. The health is good.” 18
    The paternalistic Waltham/Lowell system that drew such praise contained several key ingredients. Since workers were to be recruited from a wide area, few