LOWELL, a city of Massachusetts, U.S.A., 25m. N.W. of Boston, on the Merrimack at the mouth of the Concord; a county seat of Middlesex county, and one of the principal manufacturing centres of the State and the nation. It has an airport, and is served by the Boston and Maine and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railways. The population was 112,759 in 1920 (33.7% foreign-born white) but had fallen to 100,234 in 1930 by the Federal census. The city has a beautiful site of 14.1 sq.m. in a bend on the south bank of the Merrimack, and including some territory on the opposite side of the river. Within its limits are 15.5m. of water-courses (rivers, canals and brooks), spanned by 25o bridges. The great textile mills occupy a large tract in the heart of the city, extending for a mile along the river. A monu ment in front of the city hall commemorates the three Lowell men (Ladd, Whitney and Taylor) who were the first Northerners killed in the Civil War; and a beautiful auditorium seating 4,700 is the memorial to the men and women of the World War. The assessed valuation of property in 1927 was $141,759,193. The population has the usual characteristics of a factory centre: a preponderance of women; a high proportion of women and girls at work; and a relatively high, but decreasing, infant mortality. In 1911 the city adopted a commission form of government, but in 1920 it reverted to the mayoralty form. Lowell is the seat of a State normal school, and of the Lowell Textile school, incorpo rated in 1895, when the New England mills had begun to feel the effects of the rapid development of the manufacture of the coarser cotton fabrics in the Southern states, to promote a wider and more thorough application of the arts and sciences to the production of finer and more varied fabrics. Cotton fabrics are still Lowell's leading product, but the industries have become increasingly di versified, until the list of articles made by the 400 manufacturing establishments runs through all the letters of the alphabet, from acids, aprons, art gum and ash sifters, to yeast, yarn and "zipper" products. The aggregate factory output in 1927 was valued at $69,171,107, of which $58,950,706 represented cotton goods, $9,059,505, worsteds, and $5,854,492 boots and shoes. Lowell is a shopping centre for the populous adjacent towns of the Merrimack valley. Bank debits in 1926 amounted to $247,407,000.
At the close of the 18th century there was only a small village on the site of the present city of Lowell. A carding mill was built
in 1801, and in 1804 the Middlesex canal was completed around the Pawtucket falls, to provide a continuous water thoroughfare from Concord, New Hampshire, to Boston. In 1822 the Merri mack Manufacturing company was incorporated by Patrick Tracy Jackson (178o-1847), Nathan Appleton (1779-1861), Paul Moody (1779-1831), Kirk Boott (179o-1837) and others, to es tablish cotton mills at this point. They bought the Pawtucket canal, widened and deepened it, constructed a dam, and built a lateral canal to carry the power to the site of their mills. The first cloth was made in 1823. The town was incorporated in 1826, with a population of 2,000, and was named for Francis Cabot Lowell, who in 1814 had introduced the power loom at Waltham and planned the mills there, bringing under one roof all the pro cesses in the converting of cotton into cloth. In 1836, when the town was chartered as a city, it had a population of 18,000 and a property valuation of $5,000,000. Until 1840 the mill hands, ex cept for the English dyers and calico printers, were New England girls, and after 1840 they were only gradually displaced by Irish, French-Canadian, and other immigrants. The corporation pro vided boarding-houses, and the girls had many improvement circles and literary societies. They published a periodical, The Lowell Offering, from 1840 to 1845, edited from 1842 to 1845 by Harriot F. Curtis ("Mina Myrtle"). Among its contributors were Harriet Hanson (b. 1825), who later wrote the valuable records called Early Factory Labor in New England (1883) and Loom and Spindle (1898) ; and Lucy Larcom a doffer in the mills, whose mother kept a "corporation" boarding-house, and who described the early life in the mills in An Idyl of Work (1875) and A New England Girlhood (1889). Dickens visited the city in 1842, and recorded his impressions in the fourth chapter of American Notes. A more recent description of conditions is con tained in The Record of a City, by George F. Kenngott (1912). For the greater part of the 19th century Lowell was the leading producer of cotton fabrics in the United States, and was called "The Spindle City" and "The Manchester of America." By 185o the population had grown to 33,383, and until 1890 it was the second city of the state in size. Lowell was the birthplace of James McNeill Whistler, whose home has been converted into a museum ; and was the home of Humphrey O'Sullivan, the inventor of rubber heels.