Chad Montrie

'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.

Historians have given much attention to the so-called mill girls of Lowell, the factories where they worked, and the owners and managers who backed and oversaw production, but they have not yet approached mill labor as part of a history of the changing relationship between common people and the environment. Hannah Josephson's The Golden Thread, published in 1949, is an engaging and still useful account of the textile mills' first decades, when women operatives migrated from the countryside to the newly established factories and boardinghouses, and quickly found their voices for protest. Written thirty years later, Thomas Dublin's Women at Work builds on Josephson's book and marshals the tools and methodology of new social historians to probe deeper into the backgrounds and work experience of the women operatives. More recently, Ted Steinberg's Nature Incorporated combines the insights of various fields to explain the efforts mill owners made to bring nature under their control and create a legal framework to facilitate exploitation of the Merrimack River.³ The book greatly advances the historical interpretation of antebellum textile production, but it removes mill operatives from the center of attention and, to the extent it discusses peoples' changing relationship with nature, it concentrates on owners and managers. This article makes workers the primary subjects of textile mill history once again while continuing Steinberg's agenda of bringing early industrial and economic change within the line of vision of environmental history.

Making mill operatives the primary subjects in the economic and environmental transformation of Lowell provides an opportunity to explore the development of working-class environmental consciousness, emphasizing the historical relationship between the work people do and the ways they think about nature.⁴ Like newly freed African American sharecroppers, late-nineteenth-century Appalachian coal miners, and first-generation immigrant autoworkers, Lowell's first operatives were workers in transition, occupying a key moment in the rise and maturation of industrial capitalism. As the methods, organization, and purpose of labor changed for these workers, the way they used and understood the natural world also changed. The mill hands, in particular, experienced a new form of alienation from nature that they dealt with by drawing on inherited cultural traditions and rural values as well as reinterpreting contemporary ideas like romanticism.

Before migrating from family farms scattered about northern New England, women operatives viewed nature largely in utilitarian terms, a perspective grounded in daily, direct use of the environment for the survival and comfort of themselves and other family members. A recognition of nature's beauty and a sense that it was a manifestation of God were sentiments not entirely absent from their consciousness, but not prominent or pervasive either. After their migration to work in the mills, the operatives were less able to see how their labor was any sort of productive exchange with the environment, and they felt increasingly estranged from the natural world. For many of the mill hands, nature was no longer a place where work was done but rather separate from labor, something exclusively "out there" to be brought into the mills in rarefied form if it was to be present at all, and the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the environment assumed a new importance. More often, nature was a place for casual leisure, meditation, and academic study, and, particularly when there was a chance to return home, temporary or permanent escape. In fact, this evolving view of the natural world became an important but sometimes understated part of the operatives' resistance to mill labor. The grumbling, "turnouts," and turnover that began so soon after the women's arrival in Lowell were not only about wage cuts, boardinghouse rates, and their refusal to be "slaves" to industrial tyrants. They were also about the operatives' separation from a factual as well as fictional rural landscape, one they believed was more healthy, beautiful, spiritually meaningful, and conducive to the development of good morals.

Domestic Production

THE MAJORITY of women who worked in the Lowell mills of the antebellum period haled from parts of New England first settled by whites in the decades leading up to the Revolution. This included southern Maine, southeastern New Hampshire, the hill country between the Merrimack and Connecticut river valleys, and southeastern Vermont. Between 1790 and 1830, white settlers also moved beyond alluvial bottomlands as well as farther north into the mountains. Maine's population increased threefold, and Vermont's more than twofold, while the number of residents in New Hampshire nearly doubled. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, however, the earlier-settled sections of these states already were starting to see a noticeable population decline, as young men and women left for land out West or took jobs in cities of the East.⁵ As outmigration increased, soil fertility declined, and markets encroached, subsistence-oriented agriculture gave way to raising sheep for woolen mills, which reached its height in the 1840s but thereafter could not compete with the wool being produced farther west. By the 1850s, most of the descendants of the original white inhabitants who remained had turned to making a living as dairy farmers.⁶

Prior to the economic and demographic transformation of New England, girls and women on the region's farms did a variety of tasks essential to the family economy, with a few opportunities for local trade. There was, of course, a gendered division of labor, but well into the first half of the nineteenth century the "women's sphere" encompassed quite a large number of productive activities. These included feeding poultry, milking cows, making butter and cheese, tending the garden, berry picking and other gathering, preserving and pickling, shucking corn, apple-paring, making cider and applesauce, cooking, washing, tidying the house, making soap and candles, preparing flax and cleaning fleece, spinning, knitting, weaving, and dyeing cloth, as well as bearing and caring for children. Female household members worked both outdoors and indoors through the various seasons of the year, and they did it alone, in pairs, and as part of larger groups.

Some girls and women saw parts or even all of their work as onerous—drudgery that brought little satisfaction. Tasks like cooking and spinning, which had to be done every day or constantly through the week, could be tedious. Heavy labor, such as doing the wash, also brought complaints. Yet a greater number of women on New England farms did not see their work, or most of it in any case, as either dull or unbearably difficult. In this pre-industrial age, in fact, there was not always a clear line between work and leisure, and numerous tasks were welcome occasions for enjoyment and fulfilling demonstration of skill. Young girls and older women usually could set their own pace, rarely had to deal with arbitrary or demeaning oversight, and routinely had the chance to socialize with men and other women as part of their work. Typically they were also among those who used or otherwise relied on the products and services of their labor, of which they often were rightly proud. Just as important, their work and leisure provided a direct relationship with the natural world, one that sustained a utilitarian view of the environment but which did not exclude observations of beauty and spiritual meaning.

Making soap and doing the wash, however much disliked by women, both required some knowledge of how nature could be put to use. Soft soap, for laundry, was the end product of leaching wood-ashes in a barrel to make lye and boiling this in a great pot outdoors. A harder soap, for toilet use, could be made from bayberry tallow.⁷ Making the soft soap as well as actually doing the wash required a plentiful supply of water with the right pH balance, which could be corrected by adding soda or lye. When young Tryphena Ely White first moved out to central New York in 1805, she recorded in her diary that their kettle of boiling soap "does not seem to do well," because "we were obliged to make it of river water," which was too soft. Later that month, she "washed some muslins and fine cloaths which had lain a good while dirty, waiting for rain water." To whiten clothes or remove stains, White also would have had to wait for a good spell of sunny days, to lay the garments out under the sun, taking them in at nights to prevent mildewing.⁸

Similarly, women transformed parts of nature into a useful product when they made candles from bees' wax, deer suet, moose fat, bear's grease, and mutton tallow. In addition, naturalist Peter Kalm noted the use of the waxy berries of the bayberry bush, which the Swedes called the tallow-shrub and the English sometimes called the "candle-berry tree" (indicative of how colonists and later Americans saw the natural world around them). Women saved their cooking grease, robbed their bee hives of some wax, or collected berries in the autumn, and set aside a day or more to produce their family's candle stock for the year. Nicer candles, as Catherine Beecher explained, were made by pouring a mixture of melted tallow around wicks set out in moulds. Dip candles, made by repeated dippings of wicks in a kettle of tallow, were easier to manufacture as well as cheaper. A variation on this process substituted common rushes, with parts of their outer bark stripped away, for wicks that were then dipped in tallow or grease and allowed to harden.⁹

The production of textiles, which changed so dramatically later in the nineteenth century with the advent of fully integrated water-powered mills, also required intimate knowledge and direct use of nature. Farm families usually planted a field of flax for linen cloth in May, which was weeded by young women or children in bare feet, to prevent them from crushing the tender stalks. Later, in June or July, boys and older men pulled the plants, removed the seeds, and dried and broke the stalks. After a few other steps, women put the flax fibers on the spinning wheel, bleached the thread with water and ashes, wove it on a loom and bleached the linen again in the sun. As for wool yarn, that usually came from the family's own sheep. After women picked over the raw fleece, it was carded, combed, and greased, spun into skeins on a wheel, either knitted (after a good washing) or used for weaving on a loom, and then sent to the local fulling mill. To color the wool, sometimes before but usually after the spinning, women used a variety of natural dyes derived from the bark of oak, hickory, sassafras, and birch trees as well as boiled pokeberry, onion skins, pressed goldenrods, and black walnut hulls.¹⁰

One of the other more common daily interactions that rural girls and women had with domestic animals, besides working with sheep's wool, was milking. "In those summer days," recalled Sarah Emery of her early life in Newbury, Massachusetts, "mother and Aunt Sarah rose in the early dawn, and, taking the well-scoured wooden pails from the bench by the back door, repaired to the cow yard behind the barn." The women milked the ten cows owned between them and Sarah's mother made this into cheese four days of the week, leaving it to the aunt the other days.¹¹ More frequently, milk was turned into butter by churning the skimmed cream. In 1839, after moving out to Franklin, New Hampshire, "to live in the woods among the stumps and owls," Olive Sawyer "made eleven hundred weight of new milk Cheese [and] 4 hundred of butter cheese beside considerable skim milk cheese."¹² This sort of work required that women pay some attention to what their cows were eating as well as the quality of the water they were drinking, the characteristic habits and behavior of the individual milk cows, and the passing of the seasons that brought warmer or cooler temperatures requiring different milking methods.

Women also took responsibility for their family's poultry. Geese were raised for feathers and food, according to Alice Morse Earle, and "they roamed the streets all summer, eating grass by the highways and wallowing in the puddles." Three or four times a year, women pickers plucked the feathers from the birds, who had stockings pulled over their heads to prevent biting or sometimes had their heads secured in a "goose basket." The down made bed ticking and the quills, pulled only one from a goose, were used for pens.¹³ Turkeys were raised for food as well and their care apparently was a woman's job. Between working about the house, making a cape bonnet, and noting the apple tree blossoms on walks through the orchard at her family's New Hampshire homestead, a young Sally Brown rounded out one day in March 1832 by making a turkey cage. But while women sometimes marketed the surplus eggs their hens produced, it was up to the men to sell the chickens and turkeys. Later in the year, Brown's father went to Ludlow with "his poultry" and "sold turkeys for seven and chickens for six cents a pound and my stocking yarn for five shillings a pound."¹⁴

On what were perhaps rare occasions, young women hunted small game and fished in the local brooks or ponds. In her diary entry for 4 June 1832, Sally Brown noted catching two partridges, probably using snares. Similarly, Tryphena White's activities for one late June day included housework, weeding in the garden, and "towards night I went down to the river with my hook and line to catch some trout but had no success."¹⁵ Women took opportunities for more passive experiences with wildlife too. Sarah Emery remembered long afternoons sitting upon the sill of the open door as her "fingers kept time to the murmur of the brook or the song of the birds in the willows bordering the silvery stream just beyond the gravel path, edged by flowers, the perfume of which, mingling with that of the lilacs and sweet briar, filled the air with grateful odor."¹⁶ But moments of distanced observation could be permeated by fear as well. White's journal includes numerous entries about rattlesnakes, which struck terror in women and men both. A couple of days before White went fishing for trout, when she was out picking greens with her sister Polly, they encountered a rattler and a crowd of hesitant men and women soon gathered. That particular snake escaped before they could kill it, but many others did not.¹⁷

The female members of farming households also gained firsthand experience with the many faces of nature, and some of the intricacies of ecological relationships, from cultivating vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Anna Howell kept a record of her gardening interleaved in agricultural almanacs and often mentioned the many hazards she encountered. Unrelenting storms through the month of May in 1819 and 1820, for example, destroyed the sprouts of her nutmeg melons and watermelons the first year and her cucumbers and watermelons the next, forcing her to replant.¹⁸ Late frosts in the spring and periods of drought in summer killed plants too, which Howell sometimes remedied by replanting. Other times she simply accepted lower yields or none at all. May entries for 1821 suggest that was a bad year for "worms," which "destroyed all my early corn and the greater part of cucumbers." Days later she was busy "Replanting cucumbers and Nutmeg melons the 3d and 4th time [and] Replanting water melons." This was not her first damaging visit from insect pests but the infestation started Howell thinking and the next month she recorded a way to prevent "the yellow winged bug" from destroying cucumbers by planting an onion in each hill and between peas.¹⁹

Yet women did not always view gardening as a battle against fickle weather or ravenous bugs. Sarah Emery fondly recollected the great variety of medicinal and sweet herbs as well as the flowers her grandmother cultivated. Some criticized her for such "fiddle-de-dees," and pronounced the plantings "vanity," because they did not seem as useful as turnips, leeks, carrots, or other vegetables. Emery reasoned, however, that God had decked the whole universe with beauty and "pretty surroundings" made people "happier and better." Grandmam' considered it part of woman's duty to make their home agreeable in this way and "was sure her good sisters-in-law and other croakers enjoyed a bunch of pinks or a rose as much as any one, and her mints and sweet herbs were in great demand, especially lavender, to strew in drawers among linen."²⁰ Tryphena White was more inclined to complain about the heat of the day, which forced her to get up before sunrise to weed the family's garden, but an entry recording her visit to a neighbor indicates that women could take great pride in the patch of ground they transformed. Mrs. Hopkins took White "all over her garden [to] see everything she had in it" and delayed her return home, but with "a posy of pinks and a handful of young onions for salad, and one cucumber, which was the only one she had big enough to pick."²¹

The girls and women of New England farms also witnessed the bounty and beauty of fields and forests on frequent trips to gather wild herbs, pick berries and flowers, and sometimes just to take a stroll. One day in mid-September 1832, Sally Brown finished her chores "and went to the mountain to get some Pyrola [wintergreen] to send Mrs. Webber." This plant, according to Lydia Maria Child, was "considered good for all humors, particularly scrofula," and some called it "rheumatism-weed" because a wintergreen tea supposedly soothed that disorder. Through the summer months, Sally also made frequent trips with her friends Susan and Marcia to pick strawberries, currants, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries. These were for eating fresh and as preserves, of course, but like wild herbs, the berries and parts of berry bushes had medicinal uses, too. Child noted that blackberries were "useful in cases of dysentery" and recommended a tea made of the roots and leaves as well as a syrup.²² Later, after they had migrated to Lowell and other textile towns to work in the mills, young women like Sally would look back longingly on the days they spent roaming hillsides, walking along brooks, and lying about in meadows. Then, however, it was not so much the herbs and berries they missed but real and imagined opportunities for reverie and delight in nature.

Mill Labor

AS HAS BEEN described in detail elsewhere, Lowell, Massachusetts, was carved out of land on the banks of the Merrimack River, starting with 350 acres purchased by Boston investors from farmers in 1821. Then the area was a mix of woodlots, fields, orchards, houses, and a couple of dirt roads. Several systems of locks and canals had been completed by 1814, linking up Concord, New Hampshire, and Boston, but new settlement and commerce did not significantly transform the environs until the mid-1820s, when the first textile mills were constructed. By the late 1830s, Lowell was a bustling town with twenty-eight mills employing eight thousand workers, the great majority of whom were women from the New England countryside. They worked at the many machines powered by turning waterwheels in the factory basements, producing sheetings, calicoes, broadcloths, carpets, and rugs for a growing market. It was all quite different from what the mill girls had been used to at home. Now they were wage laborers, working under central supervision, making products for unknown consumers, and usually living in one of the many boarding houses scattered about what was quickly becoming the second-largest city in the state.²³

The new factory labor also severed the direct relationship women migrants had once had with nature through work. They were confined to the "built environment" of noisy workrooms in sprawling mills for hours on end, employed at tasks that seemed distanced from anything like transforming parts of the natural world into useful products. To be sure, Lowell was still a semi-rural place in many respects, the mills were crafted edifices of brick and wood often edged by flower gardens, and it was raw cotton and wool that the workers manufactured into finished goods. But the experience simply did not compare to living and working on their native rural homesteads. This seems to have become more evident as the years passed, and it played an important part in the women's growing disenchantment with mill labor. The otherwise tame writing in literary experiments like the Lowell Offering included numerous expressions of disillusionment with factory life and pining for home. These often centered on differences in landscape and were coupled with romantic musing about the beauty and spiritual fullness of nature. Such sentiments also factored into the militant resistance mill hands began to organize in the 1830s, finding their way into columns of the radical Voice of Industry.

Some operatives felt fortunate to leave off having to "pick rocks, and weed the garden, and drop corn, and rake hay."²⁴ Sally Rice left her parents and siblings in Somerset, Vermont, in the 1830s, first to work on a farm in New York and then to labor in a Connecticut mill, but she never wished to return to her old home. "I can never be happy there in among so many mountains," Rice wrote after a brief visit back to Somerset, and she pledged not to settle on the family's rocky farm "in that wilderness."²⁵ Others, like Harriet Farley, emphasized the pastoral quality of the mill village as one of the attractions of the factory system. Home-manufacture in old England, she argued, was an ugly life of poverty and discomfort. Textile manufacturing in places like Amesbury, Massachusetts, however, was different. The town was situated, "as is almost every factory village, in the midst of most attractive natural scenery." At any rate, Farley maintained, mill girls were not permanent wage laborers and frequently returned home for a few weeks or months, where a "change of air and diet are conducive to health."²⁶

Figure 1. View of Lowell.
East view of Lowell, 1839, drawn by J. W. Barber as a bucolic scene.

Image courtesy of the Lowell Historical Society.

Yet many of the female operatives in Lowell who put pen to paper in correspondence, diaries, literary journals, and operatives' newspapers, were less than enthusiastic about work in the mills there. Among the more common objections was the routine confinement among clattering machinery and noxious lamp smoke. After working in a weaving room for only sixteen weeks, Susan Brown complained of being "immured within the massey brick walls of a hateful factory" and declared her intention to return to her family's home in Epsom, New Hampshire.²⁷ Likewise, while she sometimes found the work agreeable, Lucy Larcom had her moments when "the confinement of the mill became very wearisome to me." One June day, when the weather was fair, she leaned far out of the window, trying to escape the "clash of sound" inside and, looking at the distant hills, cried out "Oh that I had wings!"²⁸ Writing under a pseudonym, Harriet Farley also described feeling cooped up in the mill where she worked. Looking out of the window at "the bright loveliness of nature," she felt "like a prisoned bird, with its painful longings for an unchecked flight amidst the beautiful creation around me."²⁹

The desire for release from the mills was prompted both by what operatives could see and sometimes hear outside their workrooms as well as by the conditions within them, a contrast often employed by factory critics. "[T]he graceful form, the bright and sparking eye, the blushing cheek and the elastic motions of 'Industry's Angel daughters,' " did not belong "to Lowell Cotton Mills, but to New England's country Homes," where "the fair cheek, kissed by the sunlight and the breeze, grew fresh and healthful."³⁰ In fact, operatives frequently fell ill from their work and left their positions for days, weeks, and even months to recuperate. Permielia Dame made her way from Rochester, New Hampshire, to the Lowell mills in the mid-1830s, but soon after was writing her brother about becoming sick and taking an absence. She had intended to answer his last letter earlier, Dame explained, but "my health being very bad and my eyes very weak that I was obliged to leave the Factory for a short time." She made a short trip to Boston but this did not help, and so she took more time off and "went to New Hampshire and there visited all our friends and connections."³¹

The conditions operatives experienced in the red brick mills depended to some extent on their particular job and where in the factory they worked. But upon first arrival most hands were surprised by the general noise level from the clattering machinery and the suffocating smoke from the many oil lamps. Factory windows were numerous and tall, set in repetitious rows from one end of a building to the other, to make better use of natural light. They were kept closed even on the hottest summer days, however, and steam was sometimes sprayed in the air inside, both practices necessary for maintaining the proper humidity to keep threads moist. Working from five in the morning to seven in the evening, with a half hour each for breakfast and dinner, the operatives also inhaled dangerous amounts of cotton fibers. When they started becoming more militant and creating lists of their grievances, in fact, many of the women cited workroom conditions as detrimental to their health. "We are perfectly certain, from personal observation," wrote one trade unionist, "that these long hours of labor in confined rooms, are very injurious to health, and we doubt whether it would be using too harsh terms to say, that the whole system is one of slow and legal assassination."³²

The world outside the factory clearly was viewed by most mill hands and other observers as preferable to that inside the mills. This explains, in part, the popularity of outdoor leisure activities, which assumed a new importance in the urban-industrial context. Operatives frequently used the time they were not expected to be at work for walks around Lowell as well as more ambitious excursions elsewhere. Lucy Larcom recalled making herself familiar with the "rocky nooks along Pawtucket Falls, shaded with hemlocks and white birches" and dotted with "strange new wild flowers." She and her companions also occupied their free time with walks to where the Concord met the Merrimack, around the old canal path, and up Dracut Heights "to look away to the dim blue mountains." But the women did not have to go far to see nature, she claimed, because it came up close to the mill-gates. "There was green grass all around them; violets and wild geraniums grew by the canals," Larcom remembered, "and long stretches of open land between the corporation buildings and the street made the town seem country-like."³³

From the beginning, mill owners had made some effort to beautify Lowell as part of their paternalist scheme. They instructed managers to maintain flower gardens just outside the factories and, because the original mill acreage was mostly cleared farmland, they oversaw tree planting. Kirk Boott gave particular attention to establishing lines of elms along Dutton Street and the Merrimack Canal, which others continued after his death. Starting in the late 1820s, workers used the strip of land between the street and canal as an unofficial promenade, which operative Maria Currier called a "delightful retreat." And opportunities for pleasant strolls within Lowell increased in the 1840s, when the city purchased land for the North and South Commons, a total of thirty acres, also accessible by tree-lined paths. Not long after this, a group of prominent citizens founded the Lowell Cemetery on forty-five acres along the banks of the Concord River. Its design included winding paths that followed the hilly contour of the area as well as a lake.³⁴ In a poem about the place, operative Lydia Sarah Hall described it as "That forest wild ... like a spot enchanted," where the "tearful eye of nature glistened" to look on the dead gathered in the ground.³⁵

Despite the various local sites for taking leisurely walks, however, some mill hands felt compelled to wander a greater distance, seeking more of an escape. Like the short jaunts closer to "home," these explorations occasionally served as inspiration to wax lyrical. This is evident in an article entitled "A Morning Walk," signed by "V.C.N.":

I had wandered forth ere yet the sun had commenced his course in the heavens, and directed my steps to the banks of the Merrimack that so carelessly was rolling its tranquil waters to mingle with the great deep ... and resumed my walk to gaze upon the glories and beauties of the waters, the woods, the fields, and the sweet, blue heavens that with tinseled clouds and gorgeous drapery, enclosed the scene: and while beholding all that was around me, and calling before the mind, as far as memory and imagination would enable me, the event of the past and future, I was led to think upon the Creator of them all ... I sat musing thus till roused by the peeling tones of the bell which told me that I was wanted, when I arose and walked into the city where, as usual, all was noise and bustle, but my mind had enjoyed a calmness and serenity not easily effaced, and I felt that I was much profited by my morning walk.³⁶

Women operatives commonly expressed such reverie in their writing, both private and published. What they meant to convey was the rapture to be found in getting closer to a natural world denied them in the factories and sometimes the city itself.

To get even farther away from Lowell, workers also took trips that required travel by stagecoach or train. One woman made a July excursion to Lebanon Springs, on the other side of Worcester, and wrote a brief account. "Those who have for any length of time been pent up in a cotton mill and factory boardinghouse," she explained, "can appreciate the pleasures of a journey through the country, when the earth is dressed in her richest roves of green, bedecked with flowers, and all smiling with sunlight." What she saw and thoroughly enjoyed was not wilderness, but "farmhouses, gardens and orchards, barns, grass-lands, fields of corn and grain, potatoe plants, wood-lots, pasture-lands, with herds of neat cattle, flocks of sheep, &c., all beautifully interspersed." The trip confirmed for her the notion "that man had made the town, but God made the country."³⁷ Others deliberately sought out the wild and they found God there too. Writing from the Mount Washington House in New Hampshire, Sarah Bagley wished her friends were there "to enjoy with us the wild, romantic, mountain scenery around." The view, she said, was "grand and sublime ... beyond the power of words to describe," and it prompted a soul "to sit still and commune with its Maker."³⁸

Figure 2. Dutton Street boardinghouses.
Dutton Street boardinghouses along the Merrimack Canal, leading to the Merrimack Mills, 1846.

Image courtesy of the Lowell Historical Society.

As should be obvious, the rhetoric mill operatives used to describe various natural scenes, and the emotions their descriptions betray, were at least partly derived from the romantic literary influences of the day. This poetry and literature encouraged a view of nature full of beauty, harmony, and moral symbolism, all of which was evidence of divine creation and design. It was not a way of observing the natural world unfamiliar to the women migrants, some of whom would have read Mrs. Sigourney, Whittier, Bryant, and others before coming to Lowell. Even the New England Farmer frequently printed original and previously published items about the sublimity of mountains and valleys and the like, meant for both male and female readers. One column of advice, run after the mills had begun to so dramatically affect rural villages, suggested that farmers' daughters might be enticed to stay at home with a good selection of books and periodicals, a tasteful garden with flowers, shrubs, and winding paths "where she can luxuriate on Nature's charms," and a shady bower inviting her to "Converse with Nature, and commune with Nature's God."³⁹ But, perhaps ironically, romantic literature was much more available to operatives once they were in the "City of Spindles," and it was urban-industrial life that most encouraged them to embrace its sentimental precepts.

In her memoir of factory life, Harriet Robinson claimed that some women came to Lowell primarily for its circulating libraries, because they "lived in secluded parts of New England, where books were scarce, and there was no cultivated society." While this is something of an overstatement, it is probably not entirely untrue either. Many boardinghouses also offered a wide range of periodicals, from Ladies' Book to The Dial. Spinners and weavers used to read and write at their machines as well. They brought "their favorite 'pieces' of poetry, hymns, and extracts, and pasted them up over their looms or frames," thus skirting the rule against openly reading books in the mill. The more literary-minded operatives secretly captured their thoughts, according to Robinson, in notebooks and "on scraps of paper which we hid 'between whiles' in the waste-boxes upon which we sat while waiting for the looms or frames to need attention." Some of these workers were among the groups that started the city's famous literary journals.⁴⁰

The pages of the Lowell Offering, Operatives' Magazine, and New England Offering, as well as the more political Voice of Industry, were filled with countless examples of sentimental stories and poetry about nature. Many contributors pondered the seasons, and spring was a particular favorite, a welcome explosion of color and new life to transform a comparably colorless and dead winter landscape. In a poem entitled "The Scenes of Nature," Francine described the April pleasures of wandering in the woods, when the month's "warmth has waked the flowers," and listening to the brook, "with sweetest music in its songs." These scenes in the "wilds nature has spread," she wrote, "with raptured gaze my senses rove," and they caused her to reflect on the "wondrous lesson" of God's love.⁴¹ But authors also had something to say for the other three seasons, including winter, coming on "with his icy train in noble majesty, greeting all that impedes his way with chilling frost and bright mantles of pure white snow; and in his course imparting many pleasures in defiance of his dreary aspect."⁴² Just as often, they discussed the changing of the seasons, and plumbed this aspect of passing time for metaphysical significance. "Transient is all earthly pleasure," wrote one operative, "Joys and grief alternate rise;/Here we've no abiding treasure,/Yet it waits for us in the skies."⁴³

It was rare that a story or poem that dealt with some aspect of the natural world did not draw a connection to the divine. "It is not possible to hear the sweet music of the birds, warbling forth their notes from every bough," explained an Operatives' Magazine author, "without feeling the mind impressed with a sense of the wisdom of our Creator, and conceiving pleasures and delights unlike and far purer than can be gained or conceived of in the crowd and noise of the city."⁴⁴ Every part of nature, so full of beauty, harmony, and power, it seemed, was evidence of God's existence and will. The creation was "a stupendous display of power, intelligence, wisdom, and benevolence" marked by "beauty, harmony, and magnificence, in all her wise arrangements." The music of the birds, grandeur of the forest, and beauty of the floweret, wrote one operative, as well as the purling streamlet, majestic river, vine-clad hills, and towering mountains, all betokened "a wonderful exhibition of wisdom and goodness."⁴⁵ God's power and worthiness of praise were evidenced in the wild and destructive as well. "In the roar of mighty waters, in the deaf[e]ning combat of the elements above, and in the wild tornado's startling fury and dread effects," maintained Huldah J. Stone, "we recognize the voice and presence of the Great Omnipotent. Listen we, one moment to the great orchestra of Nature's Temple! O, what strains of harmony swell through its glittering vaults!"⁴⁶

Figure 3. The Lowell Offering.
Cover of the Lowell Offering, one of the literary journals produced by women mill workers.

Image courtesy of the Lowell Historical Society.

In various other pieces, mill hands held up observations of nature as evidence that they should put time to wise use. "That the earth is a place for improvement is almost too plain to need the illustration," declared one operative, "for wherever we turn we meet with something, which, if remembered and brought into practice, will tend to our advancement." She pointed to the bee and the ant as examples of both industry and economy.⁴⁷ But authors also employed the natural world as a foil to critique industry and sometimes the material world in general. In "Alone with Nature," Adelaide (probably Lydia Sarah Hall) wrote of retreat to "some sylvan spot/Where art, the spoiler, ventures not," and counseled leaving "the haunts of selfish men" to "learn thy Maker's ways to scan" in this "purest of society/With brook and bird, and flowers and tree."⁴⁸ Standing to gaze from the "prison walls" of the mill, another poet, Mary, wondered if the river's waters spring "From the hand of its Almighty Giver ... to add to the miser's gold." No, she concluded, their purpose was to cheer and bless the human race, but they had been turned from that aim "To sap the life-blood from young veins,/And fill the Funeral Urn!"⁴⁹

Longing For Home

AMONG THE STORIES, poems, letters, and memoirs written by Lowell operatives in the antebellum period were countless recollections of home. This writing, perhaps more than any other they did at the time and later, best expressed the women's belief in the virtues of rural landscapes and country life. The selective way they dealt with the theme, placing emphasis on certain aspects of their previous experience and excluding discussion of others, also demonstrates how the workers' thinking about the natural world had changed since they came to work in the mills. Other accounts of growing up on New England farms, and the domestic production that was so central to the lives of girls and women, were generally matter-of-fact, suggesting that nature's utility was significantly more important than its beauty or divine qualities. This was true of diaries as well as correspondence written by rural-dwelling women who never went to the mills. It also was true of documents written by operatives before they migrated. Once they had spent some time in the Lowell factories, however, many of the women gave far more attention to aesthetic and spiritual aspects of nature.

Operatives' writings about home make clear that they were using romanticism to develop a critique and even rejection of industrial capitalism. They had come to Lowell for the economic opportunity offered by the mills and the various attractions of urban life, but their new work and even the city itself was not comparable to domestic production at their home place. Back in the hills and vales, many girls and women had read romantic poems and stories, and this apparently shaped the ways they mused about the natural world around them even then. But leaving the farm for the City of Spindles brought them in contact with many other women like themselves, gave them much easier access to the literary creations of romantics, and, most importantly, immersed them in an urban-industrial environment that made that literature more meaningful. Their real, present lives became a point of comparison to the lost, rural landscape of their former lives, which they took poetic license to embellish and use as a foil.

Elizabeth Emerson Turner grew up in Vermont, "in one of the pleasant towns of the banks of the Connecticut [River]," a place she later described for the Lowell Offering as "diversified scenery of field and forest, hill and plain." Her native home, or "the old farm" as family members called it, had been settled originally by a grandfather when the "country was still wilderness." In the intervening sixty years since that time, the homestead had become a site for a variety of pastoral delights:

The sunny hill side, with its beautiful grove of tall maple trees, bringing the merry times of sugar-making to remembrance: the orchard with its excellent fruit—and many a happy hour have I there spent, in rambling from tree to tree, and selecting the choicest and most beautiful apples for my young friends: the old cottage farmhouse, with the two majestic elms that overshadowed it, waving and sighing in the summer breeze, or sturdily braving the rude autumnal blast: the garden, its green alleys bordered with flowers of every hue: its cherry trees and currant bushes. Well do I remember the accustomed place of each plant and flower—the lilac and rosebush, the peony strawberry plat - and in particular a large asparagus bed, which I used to admire in spring for its delicate, pale green leaves and branches, and in autumn for its bright crimson berries.⁵⁰

Having worked in a Lowell mill, Turner developed a great fondness for her former way of life, which might have partly resembled her description but surely was not so free and easy. Interestingly, her estrangement from nature as an urban factory operative seems also to have encouraged a more distant relationship with a rural environment as well. In her account, Turner was more a passive observer than a producer laboring to transform nature into something useful.

Betsey Chamberlain, who was born in the New Hampshire town of Wolfeboro and moved to Brookfield after marriage, had similar memories of her home place. She described the landscape and life there as distinct from what was to be found in the New Market, New Hampshire, and Lowell mills where she later worked. During childhood, Chamberlain "waded the pond for lilies, and the brooks for minnows; I roamed the fields for berries, and the meadows for flowers; I wandered the woods for ivy-plums, and picked ising-glass from the rocks; I watched the robins that built for many years their nest in the chestnut tree; and nursed, with truly motherly care, the early lambs and chickens." There certainly was evidence of work being done in these memories, but survival and comfort seemed almost gratuitous and nature afforded as much enjoyment as it did utility.⁵¹ Likewise, "V." recalled "the many delightful scenes of my native place, including the noisy cascade "whose spattering foam was wont to spread a continual dew upon the flowers I carefully cultivated upon its banks." There was also the arbor, "inviting the wanderer to its cool and shady retreat" and filled with "the melody of happy songsters as they played from bough to bough."⁵²

Other operatives made a more explicit contrast between their home and the mills. One mill hand claimed, in "Cure for Discontent," that traveling to her native village in her imagination, while "doing her duty" in the mill, was what made the factory tolerable.⁵³ But what is interesting is the particular type of mental retreat workers made. In a short piece titled "Thoughts on Home," E. D. returned in her mind to "the green hills of my childhood," picturing her home amid vines and flowers, with the garden blooming, "the orchard laden with its golden fruit," and a silver stream meandering through the field. This "waking dream" was rudely interrupted, however, by the factory bell, telling her that she was "still a wanderer, far from home and those I love, dwelling where all are strangers, and few are kind."⁵⁴ In "Factory Girl's Reverie," another operative lamented being so far from home, to "toil day after day in the noisy mill." She wished to be a child again, to "wander in my little flower garden, and cull its choicest blossoms, and while away the hours in that bower, with cousin Rachel."⁵⁵

Quite often, being homesick and wishing to escape the confines of Lowell inspired the workers to write a poem. "I've a pleasant mountain home," penned Caroline Whitney, "And in summer love to roam, /By the sparkling rill,/That comes dancing down the hill." She loved the "aspect wild" of the mountain walls that hid the family's cottage from the world and longed again for "a rural life/Free from every heated strife."⁵⁶ A poem signed "S.A.M." also described the beauty of her family's home place as well as the pleasures of fishing in the streams there. She recalled:

Thy fields, thy woodlands, and thy flow'ry meads,
List'ning to the warblers chanting there
Their joyful notes, [I] have whiled the hours away.
I've heard the murmurs of thy rivulets;
And, seated on their mossy banks, have caught
The silvery trout...⁵⁷

Still others were prompted to make song. In "The Lowell Factory Girl," the singer lamented leaving her "native country" to be "summon'd by the bell" and, declaring the sentiments of so many other operatives, explained, "I think less of the factory/Than of my native dell."⁵⁸

The Voice of Industry, it seems, was more inclined to print correspondence from operatives who had left the mills for a spell and wished to remark on their contentment at home. Writing in October 1846, J. R. assured her friends "think not while surrounded by the green fields, feasting my mind with their beauties, that I do not cast a sympathizing thought to the many shut up in the mills, constantly toiling, without time to look abroad upon the face of nature and 'view the glorious handiworks of their Creator.' " Being home gave her a chance to wander the banks of the river, waters that fed the Merrimack River and eventually turned the belts of the Lowell mills. There she listened to bird song but also pondered "the evils growing up in the present state of society, which must undermine all glorious scenes with 'her thousand votaries of art.' "⁵⁹ In a letter from her mountain home in Cabot, Huldah J. Stone also addressed the operatives' struggle and mixed this with thoughts on the local landscape. Rather than be fooled by "infallible clergy," she wrote, the laboring classes would be better off "studying the beautiful—the sublime, volume of Nature, if we would learn of God aright." In His works, she maintained, there were harmony and grandeur, and by studying the laws that governed this world "science and true Christianity may walk among us hand in hand, causing the waste places around us to become gardens of truth's own planting, in which shall flourish the unfading flowers of virtuous friendships and human sympathies."⁶⁰

The landscapes operatives remembered, however, were not always hills and mountain valleys. In her memoir, A New England Girlhood, first published in 1889, Lucy Larcom wrote about growing up in Beverly, a seaside town in Massachusetts. As a child, she roamed freely on ledges overlooking the ocean, studied the wild flowers of meadow fields, walked along the river banks, and explored the treasures of the beaches. "The tide was the greatest marvel," she recalled, "slipping away so noiselessly and creeping back so softly over the flats ... dashing against the rocks, it drove me back to where the sea-lovage and purple beach-peas had dared to root themselves." Sometimes her brother John would take her with him when he went huckleberrying in the woods, which she liked even better than the sea. He usually left her sitting on a rock where she gazed at the "tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the sky-openings above me, the graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy-cups, as if the elves had just spread their table for tea, the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air, all wove a web of enchantment about me, from which I had no wish to disentangle myself."⁶¹

Later, when Larcom's sea-captain father had made her mother a widow, the family moved to Lowell and Lucy went to work in the mills. Having been hooked on poetry by Coleridge's "Mont Blanc Before Sunrise," she was fascinated by the other operatives' talk of real mountains and life there. But when she was sixteen years old and her older sisters married and had babies, Larcom eagerly returned to Beverly to help out with the housework. "One of them sent for me just when the close air and long days' work were beginning to tell upon my health," she explained, "and it was decided that I had better go. The salt wind soon restored my strength, and those months of quiet family life were very good for me." When Larcom returned to "daily toil among workmates from the hill-country, the scenery to which they belonged became also a part of my life." Perhaps she meant by this that, having known a sense of escape from the mills on the coast, she could better appreciate what the distant summits offered in the way of retreat. "Every blossom and every dewdrop at our feet was touched with some tint of that far-off splendor," she wrote, "and every pebble by the wayside was a messenger from the peak that our feet would stand upon by and by."⁶²

Operatives like Larcom and her workmates had their lives dramatically transformed by the urban-industrial development Lowell mills represented, and their way of thinking about the world around them evolved accordingly. Coming from New England farms, they were familiar with fairly satisfying labor that usually entailed a direct relationship with nature. But work in the textile factories was not like this. Instead, mill hands toiled among noisy machines for a wage, through a regimented work-day, with comparably little variety and even much less skill in the work. When operatives responded to these new conditions, as other historians have explained, they employed the rhetoric of the Revolution, inherited from Yankee relations, refusing to be made slaves to man or machine. Many of them, both those professing at times to be content with factory work as well as militant union organizers, also embraced a romantic version of nature, which they identified with the homes and the landscapes they had lost. In a sense, they cultivated a mental separation to match a real, actual breach from the natural world. This estrangement, at the level of consciousness and activity, is also part of our inheritance.

Chad Montrie is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His most recent publication is To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). This article is based on research for his latest project, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States.

Notes

The author would like to thank Mary Blewett, Martha Mayo, Gray Fitzsimons, John Cumbler, Rose Paton, and Deborah Friedman for their help with this article. Adam Rome and one of the manuscript readers also made valuable suggestions for revision.

^1. Sarah G. Bagley, writing in Lowell Offering, December 1840, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Factory Girls: A Collection of Writings on Life and Struggles in the New England Factories of the 1840's (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 36–37.

^2. Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood: Outline from Memory (1889; reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 162–3.

^3. Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England's Mill Girls and Magnates (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949); Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). This list is certainly not exhaustive, but the three works are key in constructing social and environmental narratives of the Lowell mills. For an even more recent addition to the environmental historiography that focuses on the Connecticut River valley, see John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

^4. See Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Richard Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Lauro Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); and Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Race, Class, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

^5. Harold Fisher Wilson, The Hill Country of Northern New England: Its Social and Economic History (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 19, 23–24; Judd, Common Lands, Common People, 16–17, 32.

^6. Norman W. Smith, "A Mature Frontier: The New Hampshire Economy, 1790–1850," Historical New Hampshire 24 (1969): 5.

^7. Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (1898; reprint, Stockbridge, Mass.: The Berkshire Traveller Press, 1974), 254–5.

^8. 7 July and 19 July 1805, in Tryphena Ely White, Tryphena Ely White's Journal (New York: Grafton Press, 1904), 22, 25; Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 309, 327.

^9. Earle, Home Life, 37–39; Beecher, A Treatise, 306–7; Rolla Milton Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (New York: August M. Kelley, 1966), 232.

^10. Earle, Home Life, 166–74, 193–202; Lydia Maria Child, ed., The American Frugal Housewife (1829; reprint, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 38–40; Tryon, Household Manufactures, 191–212.

^11. Sarah Anna Emery, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (Newburyport, Mass.: William H. Huse & Co., 1879), 7.

^12. New England Farmer, 1 (10 August 1822) [Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society]; Olive Sawyer to Sabrina Bennett, 15 May 1839, in Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830–1860, ed. Thomas Dublin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 65.

^13. Earle, Home Life, 257–9.

^14. 18, 19, 21 March and 2 December 1832, Sally Brown in The Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown, 1832–38, ed. Blanche Brown Bryant and Gertrude Elaine Baker (Springfield, Vt: The William S. Bryant Foundation, 1970), 11.

^15. 4 June 1832, ibid., 13; 26 June 1805, White, Journal, 19.

^16. Emery, Reminiscences, 28–29.

^17. 24 June 1805, White, Journal, 18–19.

^18. 18, 20 May 1819, and 20 May 1820, Anna Blackwood Howell, Diaries, 1819–1839, Octavo Volumes "H" [Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society].

^19. 13, 19 May and 26 June 1821, ibid.

^20. Emery, Reminiscences, 28–29.

^21. 2 July 1805, White, Journal, 20–21.

^22. 17 September 1832, Brown, Diaries, 21; Child, ed., The American Frugal Housewife, 25.

^23. Steinberg, Nature Incorporated, 3, 52–61.

^24. "Lucinda," "Abbey's Year in Lowell," Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 1. The page numbers listed here and in other notes for the Offering refer to the bound volumes published in Westport, Conn., by the Greenwood Reprint Corporation, 1970, and available at the Center for Lowell History in Lowell, Massachusetts.

^25. Nell Kull, ed., " 'I Can Never Be So Happy There Among All Those Mountains': The Letters of Sally Rice," Vermont History 38 (1970): 52.

^26. Harriet Farley, Operatives' Reply to Hon. Jere. Clemens, Being a Sketch of Factory Life and Factory Enterprise and a Brief History of Manufacturing by Machinery (Lowell, Mass.: S.J. Varney, 1850), 3, 9–10.

^27. Mary H. Blewett, ed., Caught Between Two Worlds: The Diary of a Lowell Mill Girl, Susan Brown of Epsom, New Hampshire (Lowell, Mass.: Lowell Museum, 1984), 14.

^28. Larcom, A New England Girlhood, 182.

^29. "Ella" [Harriet Farley], "A Weaver's Reverie," Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 188–9. For short list of the pseudonyms used by Lowell Offering authors, see Lowell Offering 5 (1845): 1–3.

^30. Voice of Industry, (3 December 1847), in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Factory Girls, 92–3.

^31. Permielia Dame to George Dame, 25 January 1835, Dame Family Papers (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society).

^32. Voice of Industry (11 December 1846): 4.

^33. Larcom, A New England Girlhood, 162–4.

^34. Patrick Malone and Chuck Parrott, "Greenways in the Industrial City: Parks and Promenades along the Lowell Canals," The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 24 (1998): 19–24, 27; Alan S. Emmet, "Open Space in Lowell, 1826–1886," Research Paper (1975), Center for Lowell History, 8–9; Maria Currier, "Shade Trees," Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 233.

^35. Lydia Sarah Hall, "Lowell Cemetery," Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 186.

^36. "V. C. N.," "A Morning Walk," Operatives Magazine 3 (June 1841): 47 [Lowell Mass.: Center for Lowell History].

^37. "E.C.T.," "Journey to Lebanon Springs," Lowell Offering 2 (1842): 191.

^38. Sarah Bagley, "Letter from Mount Washington House," The New England Offering (November 1848): 171.

^39. "Annette," New England Farmer 20 (11 August 1841): 42.

^40. Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mills Girls (1898; reprint, Kailu, Hawaii: Press Pacifica, 1976), 28, 40–41, 56–57.

^41. "Francine," "The Scenes of Nature," Operatives Magazine 2 (May 1841): 23.

^42. "Anneline," "Evidence of Design in Nature," Lowell Offering 3 (1842–43): 32–33.

^43. "M. R. G.," "Address to Spring," Lowell Offering 4 (1843–44): 159.

^44. "Everes," "American Forest Scenery," Operatives Magazine 1 (April 1841): 1. This is from the first article in the first issue of the first number.

^45. "J. S. W.," "Need of a Revelation," Lowell Offering 4 (1843–44): 81.

^46. Huldah J. Stone, Voice of Industry (7 August 1845): 2.

^47. "Amanda," "Earth—A Scene of Pleasure," Operatives Magazine 4 (July 1841): 62.

^48. "Adelaide," "Alone with Nature," Operatives Magazine 3 (June 1841): 37.

^49. "Mary," Voice of Industry (12 June 1846): 3.

^50. Elizabeth Emerson Turner, "Childhood's Home," Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 68–96.

^51. Betsey Chamberlain, "Recollections of My Childhood," Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 78–79.

^52. "V.," "Love of Home," Operatives Magazine 2 (May 1841): 21.

^53. "Clementine," "The Scenes of Nature," Operatives Magazine 2 (May 1841): 29.

^54. "E. D.," "Thoughts on Home," Lowell Offering 3 (1842–43), 280.

^55. "T*****," "Factory Girl's Reverie," Lowell Offering 5 (1845), 140.

^56. Caroline Whitney, "My Mountain Home," The New England Offering (September 1849): 205.

^57. "S.A.M.," "My Mountain Home," Operatives Magazine 8 (November 1841): 115.

^58. "The Lowell Factory Girl," in Foner, ed., The Factory Girls, 6–9.

^59. J. R., Voice of Industry (23 October 1846): 4.

^60. Stone, Voice of Industry (8 May 1846): 3.

^61. Larcom, A New England Girlhood, 88–89, 106–7.

^62. Ibid., 186–7, 188–9, 194–5.

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