Lowell: A Concise History

Textile manufacturing was to nineteenth-century America what high tech is to the twenty-first. As the Silicon Valley of the mid-1800s, Lowell transformed from a quiet farming village into a global industrial powerhouse. Powered by the Merrimack River, the city attracted presidents and world leaders before sliding into a long economic decline that deepened during the Great Depression. Yet, through persistence and experimentation, Lowell has reinvented itself. This book chronicles that journey, explaining how innovation and immigration ignited the city’s explosive growth in the 1820s—and how those same forces are propelling its resurgence two hundred years later. It is the story of one of the most dynamic mid-sized cities in post-industrial America.