building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

year, Appleton and Jackson founded the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, giving
the company the lands purchased along the Pawtucket Canal and beginning a series
of works to exploit the water. A dam was constructed at a cost of 120,000 dollars
and the canal was enlarged [Figures 68‐69].
A characteristic of the Lowell Factory System was the design for the
control of the boarding houses and their inmates, as instituted in the
Waltham Manufacturing Company by Francis Cabot Lowell. These
boarding houses were long blocks of brick buildings, situated on the
banks of the river, or of the canal, a few rods from the mills at right
angles to them, and containing a sufficient number of tenements, as
they were called, to accommodate the operatives employed by the
corporation. Between the boarding houses and the mill there was
generally a long, one‐story brick building containing the Counting Room,
Superintendent's and Clerk's rooms and store rooms. The enclosure
which this arrangement of structures formed and upon which all of the
buildings opened was called the mill yard. The only access to this yard
was through the counting room and in full view of those whose business
it was to see that only those who belonged there came upon the
premises. Furthermore, the location of the Superintendent's room gave
him an unobstructed view. On one side were the boarding houses,
occupied only by known and approved tenants; on the other side were
the mills, in each room of which there was a carefully selected overseer
who was held responsible for the work, good order and proper
management of his room. In many cases, the agents and overseers were
members and sometimes deacons of the church, or, as frequently
happened, Sunday School teachers of the girls employed under them.
The interest in their welfare which this association, apart from the mill,
provided was of inestimable benefit, and, from a utilitarian point of
view, it must have caused the girls to feel a greater interest in their
work 164 .
Lowell’s commercial utopia was made possible thanks to a series of circumstances,
which encouraged a new form of industrial life. In those years, the spinning jenny,
an intermittent, multi‐spool, spinning frame, was continually being improved.
Furthermore, developments introduced by Eli Whitney and Samuel Slater’s cotton
gin (1768‐1835) enabled raw cotton to be converted into cloth in a single,
uninterrupted process. Slater, in particular, had had a number of intuitions, later
perfected by Francis Cabot Lowell, which gave rise to the textile revolution, by
164 MESERVE, Herry C., Lowell‐ an industrial dream come true, Boston, The National Association of
Cotton Manufactures, Massachusetts, 1923, p. 60
96