Hours and the Clock

The henry hooper-made bell of thethe Boston Manufacturing Co. being returned to the charles river museum, where it resides today.

Women also found arduous the long workday, 12 hours in the winter, and often 14 during spring and summer, as more light filtered into the factory. Women worked in hot, dangerous conditions from 5 am to 7 PM, over 70 hours a week. The bell regulated workers’ lives. If a minute late to the factory, they would be locked out and lose their wages for the day, or perhaps be fired. The company bell rang at 4:30 am, followed by second bell twenty minutes later—work started at 5:00. After two hours, workers rushed back to their boarding house for breakfast, work started again at 7:35. At noon, they had a 45-minute break for lunch, and then they were back on the job until 7 pm. After work, the girls enjoyed a communal supper, and then had time for reading, letter writing, some shopping, and doing wash. At 10 p.m. house mothers imposed curfew.[7]

The bell that disciplined the worker came from Paul Revere’s North End foundry in 1814; after it cracked, his once-apprentice, Henry Hooper, replaced it in 1858. In American society, the bell signified the shift from the natural rhythms of sun-time to the regularity of clock time. In 1813, the nation was predominantly agrarian; goods were primarily produced in small shops, but the ringing of the bell signaled a new era-integration of processes of production under one roof and the rise of a modern labor force. The labor force viewed the bell as tyrannical, as it tightly regulated their movements throughout the day. They decried the insistence of the bell as it took over their lives, evidenced by the two poems below:

The factory bell begins to ring,
And we must all obey,
And to our old employment go,
Or else be turned away.

Hark! Don’t you hear the fact’ry bell
Of wit and learning ‘tis the knell,
It rings them out it rings then in,
Where girls they weave, and men they spin.[8]

The significance of Lowell’s factory cannot be overstated. Taken as a whole, the building, the new technologies such as the loom, waterpower, the on-site labor force, payment in cash wages, and publicly traded stock was the wave of the future. Even Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned America as a bountiful agrarian nation not marred by mechanization, now saw the need for manufacturing to make the country competitive with other world powers. Lowell’s factory was one of the great technological innovations spurring on modernization, and anticipating the world we live in now. And, these changes, whether they stemmed from the power loom or the clock that ticked in rhythm with it, spurred on social movements—the mill girls’ agitation for change included both a fight for justice on the factory floor, and challenges to gender norms.

Perhaps most impressive was the impact that the Boston Manufacturing Company had on the economic fate of this country. In fact, by the late 1830s, the United States produced cloth more cheaply than England. In the History of Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), Sir Edward Baines declared that “’England had just lost her American Colonies.’” Without Lowell’s efforts in large-scale cotton manufacturing, economic independence from Britain would almost certainly have taken longer, with America suffering at the hands of this still powerful monarchy.

Lowell's factory in Waltham on the Charles River was so successful that its waterpower needs soon outstripped the energy available from the water falling over the Moody Street Dam. By the early 1820's, the BMC had shifted its major operations to the Merrimack River watershed in East Chelmsford. North of Boston, East Chelmsford was renamed Lowell in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, not long after his premature death at age 42 (1817). The city of Lowell became the first planned factory town in the country. Based on what was known as the Waltham-Lowell system, by the 1840s the town boasted dozens of textile factories.

To quote his contemporary Nathan Appleton: Lowell is “unquestionably entitled to the credit of being the first person who arranged all the processes of the conversion of cotton into cloth, within the walls of same building."[9] As stated in the History of the Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860 (1916), “’for the first time in America manufacturing in a factory was fully separated from industry done in the household.”’[10]

Without his breakthrough with the mechanized loom, Lowell’s dream of a textile factory would have remained just that.

End Notes:

[1] National Park Service, The Waltham-Lowell System, https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/photosmultimedia/waltham_lowell.htm
[2] Slater Mill, http://www.slatermill.org/home2/history/thread.
[3] Chaim M. Rosenberg, The Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 1775-1817 (New York: Lexington Books, 2011), 236.
[4] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 236-237.
[5] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 308.
[6] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 308.
[7] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 250.
[8] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 309.
[9] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 1
[10] Rosenberg, The Life and Times, 257.