View of Lowell, Mass : taken from the house of Elisha Fuller Esq. in Dracut

America Transformed: Lowell, Massachusetts, the first planned company mill town, is recognized as the cradle of America’s Industrial Revolution. In the 1820s, Boston financiers founded the town when they constructed a textile factory on a canal bypassing the Merrimack River’s Pawtucket Falls. By mid-century, Lowell was the largest industrial complex in the United States. The textile economy relied on cotton grown by enslaved people in the South. The jobs attracted young women from rural New England, and immigrants from French Canada, Germany, and Ireland. The accompanying view, published in 1834, illustrates how the mills dominated the city’s landscape when viewed from the north side of the Merrimack River.
Courtesy of Boston Public Library