Lowell

Lowell is a city in northeastern Massachusetts, where the Concord River flows into the Merrimack north of Boston. It was planned in the 1820s as one of the first large factory towns of the United States, with mills powered by the falls of the Merrimack.

The Boston Associates, a group of merchants, built the mills and named the town after Francis Cabot Lowell, who had brought the design of the power loom from Britain. Canals carried water from the river to the wheels of the mills, and Lowell was incorporated as a town in 1826. The looms were worked by young women from the farms of New England, called the mill girls, who lived in company boardinghouses and published their own magazine, the Lowell Offering. The mills later drew workers from Ireland, Quebec, Greece, Portugal and Cambodia, who gave the city many of its churches and neighborhoods.

UKG, the maker of software for managing staff and payroll, has one of its two head offices in Lowell. MACOM, a designer of chips for radio and optical networks, has its head office in the city.

The Lowell National Historical Park keeps the Boott Cotton Mills, where a weave room of working looms shows the noise of the old factories, and runs boat tours on the canals. Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road, was born in Lowell, and a park with stone tablets of his writing stands downtown. The Whistler House Museum of Art keeps the birthplace of the painter James McNeill Whistler. Each July the Lowell Folk Festival fills the streets with music and food from many cultures.