(guitar strum)

- [Voiceover] As Prairie Public travels around

North America, gathering materials for our documentaries,

we often come across special places

that we like to share with you.

Once such place was in Lowell, Massachusetts,

where the Industrial Revolution comes alive.

(flowing piano music)

- Lowell is one of the most important cities

in the American Industrial Revolution.

It's really the first large scale industrial city

built solely for the purpose of producing cloth

and producing profit for the mill owners.

Here they were able to bring together capital,

nature in the form of the river,

to create a power system

and also bring in a new kind of labor system

to create this first large scale city.

Lowell became a model for other industrial cities

and throughout the 19th century,

places like Lawrence and Manchester

up and down the Merrimack River Valley

that ultimately all across New England

and up and down the Eastern seaboard

would model themselves after Lowell.

So this is really where industrial America begins.

The whole reason that Lowell is here

is the water power system.

The Merrimack River in the space of

about a mile-and-a-half drops 32 feet.

And that drop is what powers these mills.

And the mills would be sided right alongside.

So the water would flow in,

flow underneath the basements of the mills,

drop down through big tunnels called penstocks,

flow through the penstock, drop down

about 15 feet onto a waterwheel,

spin the waterwheel, spin pulleys, leather belts,

and ultimately run whole rooms, whole floors,

and whole mills filled with machinery.

Originally as they're building Lowell,

there aren't any workers around.

This is really farm country in Lowell in 1820,

about 200 people lived in what today

is a city of 106,000 people.

Not a lot of a labor force to draw on.

And so the mill owners were forced to send

recruiters out into the countryside,

and they recruited the children of farmers out there.

At the time, farms weren't doing very well,

and may of the large farm families

were looking for things for their children to do.

And particularly, their daughters,

if you were a woman on the Frontier in New England,

very few opportunities opened to you.

Maybe you could work as a domestic servant,

maybe as a school mistress, but that's about it.

So this is a great opportunity for women to come in

and work for the first time.

And they would come by the thousands,

even the tens of thousands in the 1830s

and the 1840s.

And first because this was farm country,

and not very many places for them to live.

So the companies built boarding houses.

Specifically to house these mill girls

that would come down to work in the mills.

- People imagine kind of tenement style dwellings,

and pretty cramped well you'll see

it's a bit nicer then that.

Certainly was a little bit cramped.

30 or 40 girls would be living in a fairly small

boarding house unit.

But you'll see there, there's parlor space,

served as a, kind of living room but also

a dining room space, the place where the

girls would play musical instruments,

there's a piano there.

Upstairs in the boarding house you'll see a bedroom.

In each one there would be two beds.

Two girls to a bed so pretty close living up there.

Further up in the attic any sort of, leftover girls

that didn't fit in the bedroom would be living

more or less dormitory style.

Your living with 30 or 40 other girls in pretty

close proximity.

But there are benefits to that too.

If you lived on the farm maybe you wouldn't see

anybody else your own age for you know, weeks at

a time or months at a time.

Here you have the comradery of, sort of like

going to college an living in the dorms.

You form some relationships that are really

important to you through out your life.

But there were problems with it.

It comes with a, some very difficult challenging

working conditions.

This is pretty tough labor for 11, 12 hours a day.

Six days a week, in a hot sweaty humid environment.

Filled with cotton lint.

And some of the mill girls began to think about

well, might we ask for more, more wages

better working conditions and they

get together to form some of the first

labor unions in the country.

The female labor reform association was formed here

in Lowell, in the 1830s

and they begin to stage walk, outs stage strikes,

but by about the 1850s the mill girls are deciding

that this isn't the experience that they wanted

and they begin to head back home.

The mill owners need to fill in, and they turn to

the Irish labors that have been here all along.

Working, digging the canals,

building the mill systems and begin to bring in

the Irish into the mills.

That's really the first wave of immigrants

you see working here.

And then through out the 19th century

there would be waves of immigrants that come to Lowell

from really around the world

and end up working in the mills.

And you see a shift in the labor force

from being really 80% 90% women in the 1820s 1830s

as more of of the immigration groups being to flow in.

There's much more of a mix

and you see men doing jobs that maybe

women had done before.

Men has always been part of the factor process

doing some of the work like

working with the carding machines,

and they had always worked as overseers

and as mechanics,

but now increasingly throughout the 19th century

they'd become machine operators as well.

By the end of the 19th century,

you see about an even mix of men and women

working on the floor of each one of these factories.

By the end of the 19th century,

Lowell is really changing and using far more steam power

than hydro power.

About 1881 or so, it's about half and half,

and then it tips the balance the other way

in the last couple of decades of the 19th century.

Now that steam power's interesting

because it really puts Lowell out of business.

You don't need to place it along a waterway,

you don't need the drop in the water,

and that's what Lowell's unique competitive advantages was.

Well once you can put a steam engine in there

and do it efficiently and do it fairly cheaply,

well now you can put a factory anywhere you want.

So by the 1880s, places like Fall River

are far larger textile cities than Lowell ever was.

What Lowell's model had created

had now just put it out of business.

(gentle guitar strum)

- [Voiceover] Prairie Mosaic is funded by

The Minnesota Arts And Cultural Heritage Fund

with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota

on November Fourth 2008,

The North Dakota Council On The Arts,

and by the members of Prairie Public.