By Jennifer Myers, jmyers@lowellsun.com
The brick walls of a mill building stand amid the brush and pools of water in Lowell's Hamilton Canal District. Next spring, work will begin on a 10-year, $800 million revitalization that promises to bring new life to the area while honoring the city's industrial past. SUN / TORY GERMANN
LOWELL -- A locked gate topped by barbed wire guards a neglected treasure on the edge of the downtown. The rubble of an industrial city's birth.
"It goes back to the whole reason the city is here," said Steve Stowell, administrator of the city's Historic Board.
It was 1821 when Nathan Appleton and Patrick Jackson were lured to the farmland of what was then East Chelmsford by the enticing 34-foot, 10,000-horsepower drop of the Pawtucket Falls, the key to unlocking a gold mine of hydro-powered manufacturing.
The clock tower of City Hall is framed through a window of the two-story shell that once housed the Appleton dye house. SUN / TORY GERMANN
Appleton's dream was to build a textile-mill system just as successful as those he toured in England and Scotland, but without creating the stepped-upon, downtrodden working class he met overseas. Appleton's model hinged on his strong moral and social consciousness. Better wages. Pride in their work. A better life.
Irish laborers dug the Merrimack Canal from 1821 to 1823, bringing water power from the Pawtucket Canal, built 25 years earlier, to the site of what would become the Lowell Machine Shop and the Appleton and Hamilton mills.
In 1826, the city of Lowell (population 2,500) was officially chartered, named for Appleton's distant cousin, Francis Cabot Lowell, whose invention of the power loom made it possible to turn raw cotton into finished fabrics within the same facility.
By 1836 the Mill City boasted a population of 17,000. Nine years later, the year after the country's first large-scale industrial turbine was installed in the Appleton complex, it had become the state's second-largest city, with a population of 30,000. Many of its inhabitants were farm girls who came to the city to work in the mills, make some money, and experience a taste of independence before marriage.
In building a society around the mills, Appleton's company provided boardinghouses, schools, churches, stores, banks and books for the girls. Working for him meant you had to follow a strict moral code or be dismissed.
Mill girls earned $12 to $14 monthly, paying $5 for room and board. The girls spent their discretionary income attending lectures or plays. The penned their own literary magazine, The Lowell Offering.
When the state Legislature scoffed at the "bank" Appleton established through his corporation, paying the mill girls 6 percent interest on sums of up to $1,000, the Lowell Institute of Savings, the city's first bank, was created.
By 1846, 900 girls had deposited a total of $100,000 in savings accounts. The city prided itself on its six miles of canals, 40 mill buildings, 320,000 spindles, 10,000 looms and 10,000 workers.
Nathan Appleton died a disappointed man in 1861. He was unhappy with the direction the industry was heading in the 1850s, as new mill owners began paying higher dividends to their stockholders and not reinvesting in the mills. The days of farm girls heading to the city were also ending, as European immigrants, who Appleton did not feel had the same enthusiasm and zeal as the girls, took mill jobs.
The city's manufacturing glory days came to a halt in the 1920s, as businessmen began moving their operations south, where land was abundant, labor and taxes were cheap, and transportation was easily accessible. The South also promised fewer restrictive health and safety labor laws and a union presence far diminished from that up North.
In 1926, the Hamilton Company went into receivership.
On Oct. 31, 1927, the Appleton Company announced that 35,000 spindles and 900 looms were moving from Lowell to Anderson, S.C., closing Lowell's dense 1 million square-foot Appleton Mill complex at a cost of $780,000 to move the machines and build the new southern facilities.
The remaining 75,000 spindles and 1,500 looms were sold to pay the tax bill.
The Lowell Machine Shop, which produced equipment for the textile mills as well as locomotives, was demolished the early 1930s. Operations moved to Maine three years prior.
The industry died. The buildings remained.
Splintered wood. Bits of brick amid overgrown vegetation. Shattered windows. Collapsed floors. Haunting, hollow ruins of once-massive industrial giants. The 13 acres that time forgot.
A rusted turbine that once was the heart of the mill complex, churning powerful water from the Hamilton Canal through the mills and back out to the Pawtucket Canal, sits dejected in a pool of standing water.
The majestic clock tower of City Hall is perfectly framed through the window of the two-story shell that once housed the Appleton dye house.
Today, the focus is on preservation and rehabilitation as the city and developer Trinity Financial embark on an ambitious 10-year, $800 million revitalization of the Hamilton Canal District, the blighted section of the city sandwiched between Dutton, Jackson and Market streets, ringed by the Hamilton, Pawtucket and Merrimack canals.
Three Appleton buildings, in serious disrepair, remain on the edge of the Hamilton Canal. Walls of two other mill structures still stand along the lower Pawtucket Canal, which will be integrated into new construction. The 50,000-square-foot former home of the Saco-Lowell Shops, also known as the Freudenberg building, will be reborn as commercial retail space.
"It is the last mill complex in the National Historic Park that has not seen restoration and everything will be done to preserve as much of what is here as possible," said Adam Baacke, assistant city manager and director of the Department of Planning and Development. "It will be transformative for the city."
Baacke said that demolishing the ruins to build new construction would likely be more costly than restoring them, especially the walls that stand on the walls of the canals.
"In many spots it is the compression of weight from those walls that are keeping the canal walls structurally sound, without them the canals would collapse," he said. "It would also be impossible to build as close to the canals as the walls are now. We would lose a lot of space."
The first phase of the project, expected to break ground next spring, calls for restoring the Appleton Mills into 135 units of affordable artist live/work spaces, requiring $64 million in federal tax credits, without which Baacke said "a project this complicated could never happen."
In the end, the full scale of the project is expected to bring 425,000 square feet of commercial/office space, up to 55,000 square feet of retail space, a mix of up to 725 market-rate and affordable-housing units, 400 new permanent jobs and $4 million in annual tax revenue to the city.
Stowell likens the project to the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, a modern glass-and-steel structure built within the walls of the abandoned and fire-gutted flour mills that built that city along the Mississippi River.
Chuck Parrot, a historic architect from the National Historical Park, said he has seen the developer's preliminary sketches and is very impressed.
"I have never seen a project quite like this that incorporates the old and new so well together," he said. "It connects to the industrial character of a mill city's history, which the Park Services wants to interpret, keeping up the aspects of Lowell being a mill town wherever it is reasonable."
For more information, about the project visit www.hamiltoncanal.com.
This article appeared in the Lowell Sun on Monday, December 1, 2008