These happy days in the country village came to an end in the year 1835, when necessity forced Mrs. Larcom, after the death of her husband, to seek a home in the manufacturing community of Lowell, where there were more opportunities for the various members of her family to assist in the general maintenance of the home.
In Lowell, there were corporation boarding-houses for the operatives, requiring respectable matrons as housekeepers, and positions in the mills offered a means of livelihood to young girls. Attracted by these inducements, many New England families left their homes, in the mountains of New Hampshire and along the seacoast, and went to Lowell. The class of the employees in the mills was consequently different from the ordinary factory hand of to-day. Girls of education and refinement, who had no idea of remaining in a mill all their lives, worked in them for some years with the object, often, of helping to send a brother to college or making money enough to continue their education, or to aid dear ones who had been left suddenly without support:--
“Not always to be here among the looms,-- Scarcely a girl she knew expected that; Means to one end, their labor was,--to put Gold nest-eggs in the bank, or to redeem A mortgaged homestead, or to pay the way Through classic years at some academy; More commonly to lay a dowry by For future housekeeping.”[1]
The intention of Mr. Francis Cabot Lowell and Mr. Nathan Appleton, when they conceived the idea of establishing the mills, was to provide conditions of living for operatives, as different as possible from the Old World ideals of factory labor. They wisely decided to regard the mental and religious education of the girls as of first importance, and those who followed these plans aimed to secure young women of intelligence from the surrounding towns, and stimulate them to seek improvement in their leisure hours.
Besides the free Grammar School there were innumerable night schools; and most of the churches provided, by means of “Social Circles,” opportunities for improvement. So in Lowell there was a wide-awake set of girls working for their daily bread, with a true idea of the dignity of labor, and with the determination to make the most of themselves. They reasoned thus, as Miss Larcom expressed it: “That the manufacture of cloth should, as a branch of feminine industry, ever have suffered a shadow of discredit, will doubtless appear to future generations a most ridiculous barbarism. To prepare the clothing of the world seems to have been regarded as womanly work in all ages. The spindle and the distaff, the picturesque accompaniments of many an ancient legend--of Penelope, of Lucretia, of the Fatal Sisters themselves--have, to be sure, changed somewhat in their modern adaptation to the machinery which robes the human millions; but they are, in effect, the same instruments, used to supply the same need, at whatever period of the world’s history.”