Waltham — Home Of The Industrial Revolution

My daughter recently moved into a loft apartment in the refurbished old mills of Lowell. The city has done a lot of work and brought new life to what was once a dicey part of the city.

Waltham residents probably all feel a kinship to the Lowell mills because Francis Cabot Lowell, the founder of our own mills on the Charles River, eventually moved to Lowell, hence the name of the city.

As my daughter and I hauled furniture to her fifth floor apartment, I told her about Francis Cabot Lowell’s history and that his real work started in Waltham.

Lowell was his second start. I told her about Paul Moody, the man who helped invent and create the machinery that turned the cotton thread into fabric – in Waltham.

I hope you’ll understand my ire when, after leaving her Lowell building, I saw the American Textile Museum. Further down was Moody Street. No, not the Moody Street that is Waltham’s lifeblood, but Lowell’s own Moody Street nonetheless – and probably named after Paul.

So, let’s set the record straight here, once and for all. Waltham and only Waltham, was where the Industrial Revolution started in North America. It did not start in Lowell or any place else across the country. Here. Right here. History, timelines, Francis Cabot Lowell, Paul Moody, Sanderson and the Waltham Historical Society tell us so.

The next time someone claims Lowell is home to the Industrial Revolutionary, bust out your history books and educate that person.

So here it is — the facts. According to my good friend Edmund L. Sanderson, Francis Cabot Lowell, the son of Judge John and Sarah Lowell, was born in Newburyport on April 17, 1775, 12 days before that first revolution we just celebrated. 

Francis Cabot Lowell, a graduate of Harvard University, practiced a trade and made a fortune, according to Sanderson. Lowell lived in England partly to learn how to manufacture cotton. He also lived in Scotland and visited Manchester.

Lowell was bright, but not healthy, which is why he didn’t live long past 40. He came back to Boston and began fiddling with the design of another loom where he, his brother-in-law Patrick Tracy Johnson, Benjamin Gorham and Uriah Cotting, incorporated the Boston Manufacturing Company, a business that produced cotton, woolen and linen goods — in Waltham.

Cotting was a Boston businessman who was born in Waltham, so we can probably give him a little credit for knowing the Charles River would be a great power source. The group later purchased property in Waltham, bought water rights along the river and started building the mills immediately.

Sanderson tells us the original mill building was ninety feet by forty feet and four stories high. It was the first of its kind and it was widely copied throughout the country.

Another first. And, we can see it every time we ride across the Moody Street Bridge.

Moody, a Byfield, Newbury native, came into the fold when one of the investors opted out. Moody brought valuable knowledge to the business. At 12, Moody left his father’s farm and learned weaving in a small factory near his home.

Moody didn’t have much faith in the power loom and made a few changes, which were so successful that investors decided to spin and weave in the mill.

“The Waltham mill is believed to have been the first to combine the two in one building,” Sanderson tells us.

Yet another first. 

Moody continued creating better and more efficient equipment, which included the power loom, warping and dressing machines, a regulator for the water wheel, a double speeder, a dead spindle and a throstle filling frame.

You’ll have to pardon me because I can’t find any reference or meaning to a “warping machine.” One can only speculate on what a “double speeder,” might do and, although I understand “spindle” who knows why it’s “dead.”

Anyone with knowledge of those terms please educate all our readers, and myself.

I did find “throstle,” though. According to the dictionary the word is obsolete and means a spinning machine that twists and winds simultaneously and continuously.

Whatever those machines did, they did it well and they did it here, first.  

 Yeah, that’s right. Waltham. Us. First.

I must, in good conscience, add a proviso to this story, one that isn’t pleasant and doesn’t make me proud. The cotton used in the mills came from the south, which means it came from plantations, which means it came from slave labor. People knew and it was widely accepted.