When the first cotton sheeting came off their looms in 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell and the other investors in the Boston Manufacturing Company knew they had launched America’s Industrial Revolution. American factories had produced cotton yarn since 1790, when the British engineer Samuel Slater opened Almy and Brown’s spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but weaving had remained exclusively a domestic handicraft. The British, for their part, had solved the basic problems of the power loom by 1788, but they still made thread in one factory and cloth in another. By contrast, the Massachusetts System of Manufacture, variously called the WaItham system and, after 1823, the Lowell system, turned raw cotton into finished cloth at a single site. As important as this breakthrough was, the system prompted more far-reaching forms of integration in technology, finance, and management. Lowell’s real achievement was the invention of comprehensive industrial systems. Their success, however, hinged on his invention of the “mill girl,” whose ghost presides over the clamor of power looms at the newly restored Boott Cotton Mill in Lowell, Massachusetts.

This museum, which will open to the public this spring, represents the National Park Service’s most ambitious effort to interpret the social significance of American industrialism. As part of Lowell National Historical Park, which was founded in 1978 on the premise that the city is a living museum of American industrial history, the national park operates in partnership with Lowell Heritage State Park and three dozen local civic, educational, and business enterprises. The Boott Museum, housed in the firm’s original Counting House (1836) and Mill No. 6 (1873), joins the Visitor Center and the Mogan Cultural Center as the park’s third major installation. But it is the centerpiece. Boott Cotton Mills ran four of the twenty-two mills operating in Lowell in 1836, then America’s premier center of textile manufacture. An official list of Lowell manufactures for that year claimed 130,000 spindles, 4,200 looms, and 6,800 workers—almost 80 percent of them women. Named for Kirk Boott (1790-1837), the imperious superintendent of Lowell’s first mills on the Massachusetts system, the Boott company brought to $6.1 million the total capital invested in Lowell textile operations. That figure doubled by 1850. By then Lowell was indeed the City of Spindles, more than 320,000 in all.

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