[History] YOUNG WOMEN WERE AMERICA’S FIRST INDUSTRIAL WORKFORCE

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Factory bells governed the day in early 19th-century Lowell, Mass. They summoned the mostly young women workers to the cotton mills at 4:30 a.m., signaled meal breaks, sent them home to company boardinghouses after their 12- to-14-hour shifts, and sounded curfew at 10 p.m.

The keepers of the boardinghouses were both caretakers and disciplinarians. They cooked meals and enforced moral codes. They made sure the “mill girls,” America’s first factory laborers, went to sleep on time and to church on Sunday.

This was life in a company town—the first planned company town in the United States. It wasn’t devised that way from the start, however. When the company founders traveled northwest of Boston in late 1821, it was simply to assess a potential factory site on the Merrimack River. Mainly, could the falls there reliably power textile machinery?

The answer was yes, and they bought the land. In 1823, the first machinery started processing raw cotton into cloth. Three years later, the land was incorporated as Lowell, named after the company’s late co-founder Francis Cabot Lowell.

The workers were mostly single women ages 15 to 30 from financially strapped families in the outlying areas. They needed places to live, so the company built the boardinghouses. A town with shops, churches, and other destinations eventually rose up.

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