Lowell Boott Cotton Museum

Michael Santorelli

Sean Conway

FYSH 

8 October 2013

Lowell Boott Cotton Museum

Continuing along the quest to learn more about the history of this city, this past week’s excursion took us downtown once again. There is so much to be found downtown, and actually, we found out a lot about Lowell just by walking through the streets one Saturday afternoon. Many of the buildings have been there over a hundred years. Just up the street from our Tsongas Center, the Boott Cotton Museum stands to preserve the history of Lowell by showing visitors exactly how one of the biggest mills in Lowell functioned during the Industrial Revolution. 

Walking inside the museum, the first eye catching thing I noticed was a large scale replica of the city of Lowell. Exploring this interactive map, buildings light up, and you can learn about the different buildings you might not have otherwise known had that much historical significance. Going back to the National Park Visitor’s Center, I can recall that through some of the exhibits there, Lowell is littered with buildings that each tell a different story. In particular, the areas of town where Jack Kerouac left his mark. The Boott Museu, is one of the best representations of what Lowell was all about. 

The coolest part of the museum is the whole floor that shows how a fully functional mill works. The sound of looms working overtime really brings the visitors back in time, putting them in the shoes of the thousands of mill girls who would’ve worked there over one hundred years ago. Even if not every loom was online at the time, the sound was unbelievable, it was the one piece of that mill that astonished me the most. Then touring the living quarters of some of the working girls was also quite impressive. Accommodations were anything but adequate. In their free time, the mill girls might have gone shopping downtown. Not that they had much free time, considering the girls would be worked fourteen hours each day, five and a half days each week. Not only did you get a very accurate view of what a real mill would have looked like in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it also carries a sense of nostalgia with it as well. 

It really makes you think. You look back over the history of this great city and realize where everything began to fall into place. You can see how the city progressed, how the economic boom put Lowell on the map. Then you can also see how the mill industry collapsed. How business fled the city, and how for quite a while, it became a rather desolate city that was almost frowned upon on the north shore of Massachusetts. Somewhere intwined in this history, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, formerly the Lowell Normal School, took the city by storm. That would bring us to the present day, where UMass Lowell is quickly emerging as one of the best public universities in the state and in the nation. Leading the world in scientific research and producing students that are ready for the modern world. The city itself is in the middle of its own renaissance. The artist community is coming alive, producing plays, concerts, and art shows. There are festivals to celebrate the history of Lowell. There is a returning sense of hometown pride that hasn’t been here for years. What a fun time it is to live in the city of Lowell.