Chad Montrie

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Chad Montrie | 'I think less of the Factory: Than of My Native Dell': Labor, Nature, and the Lowell 'Mill Girls' | Environmental History, 9.2 | The History Cooperative

'I think less of the Factory: Than of My Native Dell': Labor, Nature, and the Lowell 'Mill Girls'

IN 1840, AS PART of a defense of factory life in Lowell, Massachusetts, operative Sarah Bagley pointed out that "mill girls" were not really "so far from God and nature, as many persons might suppose." They managed to maintain their relationship with nature, and nature's God, by cultivating roses, lilies, geraniums, and other plants in pots on the mill's window sills, giving their work rooms "more the appearance of a flower garden than a workshop." The perfume of the flowers supposedly pervaded the air, inspiring the operatives to praise God for such rich blessings and filling them with happiness.¹ Decades later, in a memoir, Lucy Larcom recalled how she and other mill girls would take their only summer holiday, the Fourth of July, rising early to walk down some unfamiliar road and collect wild roses. "No matter if we must get up at five the next morning and go back to our humdrum toil," she wrote, "we should have the roses to take with us for company, and the sweet air of the woodland which lingered about them would scent our thoughts all day, and make us forget the oily smell of the machinery."²

Although written for different reasons and with distinct audiences in mind, the explanations each of the operatives offered for mill hands' attachment to the flowers in their workrooms suggest the challenge capitalist industrialization posed to traditional relationships with the natural world. For workers and many other antebellum New Englanders, the new brick factories threatened to displace other, more direct and satisfying experiences with nature. Even in coming to their defense Bagley revealed the new distance mills created between workers and God's creation, while Larcom penned a more critical recollection about how flowers served as fresh balm and escape from daily toil among stinking machines. In the writings of both women, the influence of the romantic poetry and literature of the day is clearly evident, but it is also important to keep in mind that the factories where they labored provided actual points of comparison to memories of former lives, real and imagined. A significant change was taking place across the region, and Bagley and Larcom were marking its occurrence and beginning to interpret its meaning in a variety of ways.

Map 1. Lowell, Massachusetts.
Map of the city of Lowell, 1845, quickly becoming the second-largest city in Massachusetts.

Image courtesy of the Lowell Historical Society.

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