Traipsing through the Industrial Revolution
Trip Start
Jun 13, 2011
1
10
14
Trip End
Jun 26, 2011
What I did
Lowell, Massachusetts
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
When we arrived in Lowell, it was quite easy to find the visitor's center, so we started there. They had an interesting video that explained who Mr. Lowell was and why the hydro-powered textile mill was such a technological marvel. He went over to England and memorized the mechanics of it, and back in MA, a Mr. Moody was the engineer who built the first mill here. First they built one in Waltham, but the Charles River wasn't powerful enough to churn it, so they built another on the Merrimack and called the city that grew out of that Lowell. That led to the first railroad in New England being built: the Boston Maine line.
I got each of my parents a lifetime Senior Access Pass to the national parks, though it seems there are not so many on this side of the country that aren't free or really cheap. We''ll just have to plan some trips together to some of the big parks out West in the future. The rangers in Lowell were so young and enthusiastic. It was kind of cool. And the sticker sheets for my passport were only $4 as opposed to $5 in Philly, so I learned a lesson about shopping around.
Lowell is a pretty cool park - they have a special trolley you can take around, or canal tours by boat, all run by the Park Service. We decided to just walk, and it was quite pleasant. They have all these shaded benches by the canal, and the old architecture is well-preserved in this area . We saw tons of little groups of teens sitting around here, usually segregated by ethnicity. Someone needs to go in as a community organizer! There are too many "bored" teens around this summer, and Obama needs them all! Anyhow, we had a nice lunch at a Mexican place where we could sit outside under some umbrellas and enjoy the air.
While my dad went to work for a bit, my mom and I went to the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, which has a working textile operation still going on - you can see how the weaving machines work and how loud it is even with only 15 of the 200 machines running . They give out free earplugs at the museum. We talked about how Jozsi, my dad's dad, used to work in a textile mill in Budapest and sleeping in shifts in the same bed as other workers, until his brother-in-law, Gyuri, saw the conditions he was living in and sent him home. Mom said her aunts worked in factories like this their whole lives as well. The exhibit included some really vivid interviews with people who had worked in the mills in the early 20th century. And I was glad to see that they included something on where such factories are located today - these horrible conditions still exist in China, Southeast Asia and South America. Think about that when you buy new clothes... or iPods. While the mill girls suffered from horrible noise, the iPod manufacturers work in silence. But while the mill girls were running from one machine to the next all day, the Apple workers suffer from fused spines because they have to stand in one place all day. OSHA, we need your equivalent in China!!
There was also a neat exhibit about the boarding houses and the lives of some of the farmers' daughters who made up the first wave of workers in the 1830s. There is a lot of labor history in that area indeed. Katherine Paterson has several books on it, one of which I remember reading as a kid. Today I've been reading The Cost of Living by Arundhati Roy, which tells the similarly sad tale of how government corruption and incompetence have led to the building of many large dams that displace indigenous people, ruin their historic ways of living in harmony with nature, and boost the profits of sugarcane growers at the expense of the poor, the indigenous, and the environment. It's an informative book and bears reading - her style is exquisite as in The God of Small Things.
