ctory life
would effect for the worse the character of these girls. This, says
Appleton, "was a matter of deep interest. The operatives in the
manufacturing cities of Europe were notoriously of the lowest character
for intelligence and morals. The question therefore arose, and was
deeply considered, whether this degradation was the result of the
peculiar occupation or of other and distinct causes. We could not
perceive why this peculiar description of labor should vary in its
effects upon character from all other occupations." And so we find the
partners voting money, not only for factory buildings and machinery, but
for comfortable boardinghouses for the girls, and planning that these
boardinghouses should have "the most efficient guards," that they should
be in "charge of respectable women, with every provision for religious
worship." They voted nine thousand dollars for a church building and
further sums later for a library and a hospital.

The wheels of the first mill were started in September, 1823. Next
year the partners petitioned the Legislature to have their part of the
township set off to form a new town. One year later still they erected
three new mills; and in another year (1826) the town of Lowell was
incorporated.

The year 1829 found the Lowell mills in straits for lack of capital,
from which, however, they were promptly relieved by two great merchants
of Boston, Amos and Abbott Lawrence, who now became partners in the
business and who afterwards founded the city named for them farther down
on the Merrimac River.

The story of the Lowell cotton factories, for twenty years, more
or less, until the American girls operating the machines came to be
supplanted by French Canadians and Irish, is appropriately summed up in
the title of a book which describes the factory life in Lowell during
those years. The title of this book is "An Idyl of Work" and it was
written by Lucy Larcom, who was herself one of the operatives and whose
mother kept one of the corporation boarding-houses. And Lucy Larcom was
not the only one of the Lowell "factory girls" who took to writing and
lecturing. There were many others, notably, Harriet Hanson (later Mrs.
W. S. Robinson), Harriot Curtis ("Mina Myrtle"), and Harriet Farley;
and many of the "factory girls" married men who became prominent in the
world. There was no thought among them that there was anything degrading
in factory work. Most of the girls came from the surrounding f