Boott Cotton Mills Museum

GENERAL INFORMATION

The Boott Cotton Mills complex contains numerous brick mill buildings, but only the building now housing the Boott Cotton Mills Museum is part of Lowell National Historical Park. The other buildings are now apartments, condos, and offices.

Courtyard area of Boott Cotton Mills

The Boott Cotton Mills Museum is open year-round, though hours may be truncated in the winter season. From Memorial Day weekend through Thanksgiving it is generally open daily from 9:30 AM to 5 PM. The National Park Service does not publish a schedule for the entire year, but you can get one for the current season on the official Operating Hours and Seasons web page for Lowell National Historical Park.

Fee-based tickets are required to enter the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, and these are sold at the Visitor Center. At the time of this writing, tickets are $6 for adults, $4 for seniors 62 or older, $3 for students and those 6 to 16 years old, and free for children 5 and under. National Park Passes are only good for a 50 percent discount for the pass holder and up to three guests. For the latest prices, visit the National Park Service’s official Fees and Passes web page for Lowell National Historical Park.

Boott Cotton Mills is located at 115 John Street on the Merrimack River along the Eastern Canal. A free trolley bus runs seasonally between it and the Visitor Center. Keep in mind that there can be anywhere from a half hour to an hour between departures, whereas it only takes ten minutes to walk between the two locations. For those in wheelchairs, three of the trolleys can accommodate a single wheelchair. Those who have trouble walking can use the trolley, but must climb up two high steps to board (there is a handrail).

MUSEUM

Boott Cotton Mills Museum

The Boott Cotton Mills Museum consists of a Weave Room on the lower floor and traditional museum exhibits on the upper floor. An elevator is available for disabled visitors and for those who have trouble walking…and for those who are too lazy to walk up the stairs.

THE WEAVE ROOM

The Weave Room

The Weave Room is a scaled-down reproduction of a mill factory floor complete with working looms. Eighty-eight of the machines were manufactured in the early 1900s by the Draper Corporation. The National Park Service purchased them in 1990 from a closed J. P. Stevens mill in Kingsport, Tennessee. Most discarded looms from closed factories were junked and piled up outside where they lie rusting, but these were left indoors and under a tarp. There are other machines in the room as well, with some having been manufactured as recently as the early 1960s.

Front side of the Draper Loom

Back side of the Draper Loom

An actual factory floor would have had around 200-250 looms, each making 55 yards of cloth per day. The noise would have been tremendous—workers communicated by holding up colored signal flags because they couldn’t be heard even if screaming. To make matters worse, cotton fibers filled the air, giving workers brown lung, and there was no air conditioning.

Looms in the Weave Room

The mills in Lowell were designed to produce a turnkey product, whereas prior to the Industrial Revolution a mill specialized in only one aspect of textile manufacturing. Raw cotton had to be cleaned, spun into thread or yarn, and weaved into cloth, with weaving being the last process. When done, the material was packed and shipped to companies that made clothes, towels, bed sheets, and other final products. The looms in Lowell National Historical Park’s Weave Room still produce actual cloth, and this is used to make dish towels that are on sale at the museum’s gift store.

While the looms are powered by leather belts attached to the line shaft that runs the length of the factory floor, the line shaft itself is now powered by electricity, not a waterwheel as it would have been when the mill first opened, or later by water-powered turbines or steam engines. As you walk through the room, notice that the line shaft is always spinning and the belts to every machine are always moving, yet only a handful of looms are actually operating (and even these are only turned on when people come through the exhibit). The machines can be turned on and off by engaging or disengaging the flywheel on the loom to which the belt is attached.

National Park Service staff members are on duty in the Weave Room, so don’t just hurry through looking at the machines, feel free to ask someone to show you how they work.

National Park Service staff member monitors the working looms

EXHIBIT ROOM

A Mill Girl operates a loom at Boott Cotton Mills Museum

The upper floor of the museum is where you will find the traditional exhibits. The focus is on Lowell and its role in the Industrial Revolution, with all topics ultimately linking back to how they pertain to Boott Cotton Mills.

The first exhibits you come to cover the technological advances developed for and by the textile industry, and the textile production process in general. The invention most responsible for the mass production of textiles was the power loom, which was first built in England around 1785. Over the next thirty years it was improved upon by various people. In America, it was master mechanic Paul Moody who developed the country’s first successful power loom in 1816. Moody worked for Francis Cabot Lowell at his Waltham mills, and he came with him to Lowell to run the Merrimack Manufacturing Company.

Within a decade, Ira Draper had improved upon Moody’s machine so that one person could operate two looms, and by the mid-1800s one person could supervise a dozen of them. While it would seem like these innovations would put people out of work, they actually led to the mills getting bigger, which resulted in the employment of more people. The mill owners loved the increase in production, but the workers hated it because they didn’t make any more money, yet they now had to keep multiple looms running without trouble. If something went wrong and the cloth was damaged, this came out of their wages.

While most of the museum consists of information panels peppered with historical illustrations and photographs, in this section you get to see some of the actual machines. These are featured in an excellent exhibit that examines step by step how cotton bales delivered to a mill were turned into cloth. On display are a throstle spinning frame used to make yarn, a carding machine used to comb and straighten cotton fibers into rolls called slivers, and of course a loom.

Carding machine combed and straightened cotton fibers into rolls called slivers

By the mid-1800s there were approximately 150 mills operating in Lowell, from large to small. While it would appear that such competition would spell trouble for many companies, the mills actually specialized in different types of cloth, and some even made carpet. In fact, the major mill owners were all in cahoots about how to split the market so they didn’t cut into each other’s business. There is a nice exhibit on the different types of cloth produced by Boott Cotton Mills.

Exhibit on the types of cloth made at Boott Cotton Mills

The second section of the Boott Cotton Mills Museum focuses on the workers, managers, and owners. The division of labor is laid out, and biographies of important players at Boott Cotton Mills are given. This is where you can learn about labor strikes and labor unions, as well as what it was like to work in a mill. What I enjoyed most are the interesting video interviews with former mill employees. Video units are located throughout the museum, and the presentations begin with the press of a button. Most videos last about five minutes.

To go hand-in-hand with the labor topic is a 23-minute film on the American manufacturing system that developed during the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s and how it progressed. The film covers the transition from an economic system of independent craftsman to a mass production system where the craftsman became nothing more than a common laborer whose welfare now depended on a handful of very wealthy businessmen. As the American frontier moved west, eastern capitalists formed corporations that spread from coast to coast, and all the while the antagonism between the workers and the employers grew, leading to strikes and labor unions. If this sounds like pro-communist propaganda, I suppose it is, but keep in mind that the film ends in the year 1900, and by then communism was becoming popularized due to the exact issues that the film brings up.

Labor strike exhibit

The third topic is the downfall of the textile industry in the North and its impact on Lowell. After the Civil War, the textile industry began moving to the South where wages were cheaper and cotton was more accessible. The development of steam power, and eventually electricity, freed mills from having to be built along water ways, allowing them to spring up just about anywhere. To compound all of this, northern mill owners were simply too cheap to invest in new machines and modern business practices. They just kept sailing along doing things the old way. The new southern mills were built using the latest technology and outfitted with the newest machines.

By the end of the 1920s, many of the mills in Lowell had closed, and the city fell on hard times. Boott Cotton Mills ceased operation in 1954, the last of the original mills to do so. By 1960, the unemployment rate in Lowell was among the highest in the country, and soon the old buildings began falling victim to the wrecking ball. This mustered preservationists into action, sparking an urban renewal movement in the 1970s. Today, most of the surviving mills have been converted into offices, condos, and apartments.

Exhibit on the modern textile industry

SCHEDULING YOUR TIME

While I can’t see justice served with a visit of less than two hours to the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, I’m sure the typical tourist will run through the place in no more than an hour. The film alone is nearly a half hour, and you can spend an equal amount of time talking with one of the staff in the Weave Room, so that’s an hour right there without even getting to the exhibit area. I read the information at every exhibit, talked for twenty minutes in the Weave Room, and watched the film, all of which took me three hours, and I don’t see many people spending that much time either. Two hours is a sufficient time to allot for a meaningful and educational visit to the museum.

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