by Bea Peterson
On Sunday evening, October 4, residents of Wood Park and Woodbridge Heights had an opportunity to step back in time with Phyllis Chapman. Chapman, in period dress, has been portraying historic figures for 16 years, starting at the Bennington Museum. Sunday she appeared as Lucy Larcom, a nineteenth century textile mill worker, author, poet and teacher. According to Chapman Lucy was the second youngest of eight children whose widowed mother came to Lowell, MA, with her younger children to supervise a boarding house for mill workers. Lucy went to school at first but began working at the textile mill in 1837, at age 11, to help support the family.
[private]Chapman described the founding of textile mills in Lowell, using hydro power from the Merrimack River. Everything was done under one roof for the first time, she said. The cotton, picked by slaves, arrived in Lowell in 500 pound bales. The cotton was then picked from the bales by machine, cleaned and carded, then turned into ropes, then into thread and then woven into fabric. Each floor of the Lowell mills housed a different process, with the final being the weaving of fabric on the top floor.
Children who worked in the mills, called bobbin children could play until the machinery stopped, she said, then they had to quickly change all the bobbins on the machine. The process was stopped and started every 45 minutes.
The targeted workforce for these mills was young Yankee women. They worked 60 to 75 hours per week for $1.85 to $3 per week and were paid once a month. According to one of Chapman’s handouts, the Time Table of the Lowell Mills was, work began at 6:30 am and concluded at 6:30 pm from March to September and from September to March the hours were 7 am to 7 pm. The young women lived in boarding houses where the doors were closed at 10 pm, proper conduct was expected and attending public worship a requirement. Besides boarding houses, the Mills offered its employees a store and a bank.
Chapman said Lucy’s story is the story of the industrial experiment, in which thousands of Yankee farm girls became skilled, if low paid, factory workers, that transformed the economic and physical landscape of southern New England.
In 1846 Lucy left Lowell with her sister to live in Illinois. She finished her education, taught school and eventually left teaching to write full time. Her 1889 book, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory, is still in print today. A great poet, she later became a Professor in Newton, Massachusetts and, Chapman said, died of old age in her late 50s.
Chapman went on to explain how the mills and the workers changed over time as immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe and Italy came to work in the increasing number of factories throughout the Northeast. Conditions worsened over the years. Along with the photos she screened of the equipment and mills in Lowell, she had photos of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan on March 25, 1911. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, 123 women and 23 men. Many died from the fire or smoke inhalation. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three. When the fire started the workers could not escape the building because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits, a common practice used to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and pilfering. Many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth, ninth and tenth floors to the streets below. Chapman went on to say that conditions are not that different today for workers in Bangladesh where a similar incident took the lives of many women only a short time ago.
At the conclusion of the program, Chapman displayed many miniature pieces of textile equipment that she, and her husband Mike, showed her audience how to operate. It was a wonderful evening.
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