Lowell, Massachusetts: Mill Girls, Wang Labs and a Cambodian Revival

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The Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River, a mile of rapids dropping 32 feet, were a seasonal fishing site for the Pawtucket people before becoming the praying town of Wamesit and then the farm village of East Chelmsford. In the 1820s the Boston Associates, including Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson, bought the land and built a planned textile city named for Francis Cabot Lowell, fed by a mile-long canal system from the Pawtucket Dam. By the 1850s it was the largest industrial complex in the United States, weaving slave-grown cotton into cloth sold back to Southern plantations, and its workforce shifted from New England mill girls to Irish, German and French Canadian immigrants.

Wage cuts and the 1922 New England textile strike marked the decline as mills moved south, and in 1931 Harper's called Lowell a depressed industrial desert, with over a third of residents on relief. From the 1970s Wang Laboratories filled empty mills, while Cambodian refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge arrived through secondary migration in search of cheap housing. The city preserved its past through the Lowell National Historical Park and form-based zoning in the 13-acre Hamilton Canal District, and in 2022 elected Sokhary Chau, the first Cambodian-American mayor in the United States.

• By 1860 Lowell ran more cotton spindles than the 11 future Confederate states combined.
• According to historian Sven Beckert, enslaved people used the word Lowell for any coarse cotton cloth.
• Nearly half of Lowell's population was foreign born by 1900.
• Cambodian Americans made up 12.5 percent of the city in the 2010 census, and Cambodia opened a consular office there.
• Lowell gave the country CVS in 1963 and became the first U.S. city with telephone numbers in 1879.