perfumery and cosmetics, hosiery and rubber heels. Lowell was the home of the inventor of rubber heels, Humphrey O’Sullivan.
The founders of Lowell were Patrick Tracy Jackson (1780–1847), Nathan Appleton (1779–1861), Paul Moody (1779–1831) and the business manager chosen by them, Kirk Boott (1790–1837). The opportunity for developing water-power by the purchase of the canal around Pawtucket Falls (chartered for navigation in 1792) led them to choose the adjacent village of East Chelmsford as the site of their projected cotton mills; they bought the Pawtucket canal, and incorporated in 1822 the Merrimack Manufacturing Company; in 1823 the first cloth was actually made, and in 1826 a separate township was formed from part of Chelmsford and was named in honour of Francis Cabot Lowell, who with Jackson had improved Cartwright’s power loom, and had planned the mills at Waltham. In 1836 Lowell was chartered as a city. Lowell annexed parts of Tewksbury in 1834, 1874, 1888 and 1906, and parts of Dracut in 1851, 1874 and 1879. Up to 1840 the mill hands, with the exception of English dyers and calico printers, were New England girls. The “corporation,” as the employers were called, provided from the first for the welfare of their employees, and Lowell has always been notably free from labour disturbances.
The character of the early employees of the mills, later largely displaced by French Canadians and Irish, and by immigrants from various parts of Europe, is clearly seen in the periodical, The Lowell Offering, written and published by them in 1840–1845. This monthly magazine, organized by the Rev. Abel Charles Thomas (1807–1880), pastor of the First Universalist Church, was from October 1840 to March 1841 made up of articles prepared for some of the many improvement circles or literary societies; it then became broader in its scope, received more spontaneous contributions, and from October 1842 until December 1845 was edited by Harriot F. Curtis (1813–1889), known by her pen name, “Mina Myrtle,” and by Harriet Farley (1817–1907), who became manager and proprietor, and published selections from the Offering under the titles Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847) and Mind among the Spindles (1849), with an introduction by Charles Knight. In 1854 she married John Intaglio Donlevy (d. 1872). Famous contributors to the Offering were Harriet Hanson (b. 1825) and Lucy Larcom (1824–1893). Harriet Hanson wrote Early Factory Labor in New England (1883) and Loom and Spindle (1898), an important contribution to the industrial and social history of Lowell. She was prominent in the anti-slavery and woman suffrage agitations in Massachusetts, and wrote Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (1881). She married in 1848 William Stevens Robinson (1818–1876), who wrote in 1856–1876 the political essays signed “Warrington” for the Springfield Republican. Lucy Larcom,[1] born in Beverly, came to Lowell in 1835, where her widowed mother kept a “corporation” boarding-house, and where she became a “doffer,” changing bobbins in the mills. She wrote much, especially for the Offering; became an ardent abolitionist and (in 1843) the friend of Whittier; left Lowell in 1846, and taught for several years, first in Illinois, and then in Beverly and Norton, Massachusetts. An Idyl of Work (1875) describes the life of the mills and A New England Girlhood (1889) is autobiographical; she wrote many stories and poems, of which Hannah Binding Shoes is best known.
Benjamin F. Butler was from boyhood a resident of Lowell, where he began to practise law in 1841. James McNeill Whistler was born here in 1834, and in 1907 his birthplace in Worthen Street was purchased by the Art Association to be used as its headquarters and as an art museum and gallery; it was dedicated in 1908, and in the same year a replica of Rodin’s statue of Whistler was bought for the city.
See S. A. Drake, History of Middlesex County, 2, p. 53 et seq. (Boston, 1880); Illustrated History of Lowell, Massachusetts (Lowell, 1897); the books of Harriet H. Robinson and Lucy Larcom already named as bearing on the industrial conditions of the city between 1835 and 1850; and the famous description in the fourth chapter of Dickens’s American Notes.
LOWELL INSTITUTE, an educational foundation in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., providing for free public lectures, and endowed by the bequest of $237,000 left by John Lowell, junior, who died in 1836. Under the terms of his will 10% of the net income was to be added to the principal, which in 1909 was over a million dollars. None of the fund was to be invested in a building for the lectures; the trustees of the Boston Athenaeum were made visitors of the fund; but the trustee of the fund is authorized to select his own successor, although in doing so he must “always choose in preference to all others some male descendant of my grandfather John Lowell, provided there is one who is competent to hold the office of trustee, and of the name of Lowell,” the sole trustee so appointed having the entire selection of the lecturers and the subjects of lectures. The first trustee was John Lowell junior’s cousin, John Amory Lowell, who administered the trust for more than forty years, and was succeeded in 1881 by his son, Augustus Lowell, who in turn was succeeded in 1900 by his son Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who in 1909 became president of Harvard University.
The founder provided for two kinds of lectures, one popular, “and the other more abstruse, erudite and particular.” The popular lectures have taken the form of courses usually ranging from half a dozen to a dozen lectures, and covering almost every subject. The fees have always been large, and many of the most eminent men in America and Europe have lectured there. A large number of books have been published which consist of those lectures or have been based upon them. As to the advanced lectures, the founder seems to have had in view what is now called university extension, and in this he was far in advance of his time; but he did not realize that such work can only be done effectively in connexion with a great school. In pursuance of this provision public instruction of various kinds has been given from time to time by the Institute. The first freehand drawing in Boston was taught there, but was given up when the public schools undertook it. In the same way a school of practical design was carried on for many years, but finally, in 1903, was transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts. Instruction for working men was given at the Wells Memorial Institute until 1908, when the Franklin Foundation took up the work. A Teachers’ School of Science is maintained in co-operation with the Natural History Society. For many years advanced courses of lectures were given by the professors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but in 1904 they were superseded by an evening school for industrial foremen. In 1907, under the title of “Collegiate Courses,” a number of the elementary courses in Harvard University were offered free to the public under the same conditions of study and examination as in the university.
For the earlier period, see Harriett Knight Smith, History of the Lowell Institute (Boston, 1898).
LÖWENBERG, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province
of Silesia, on the Bober, 39 m. E. of Görlitz by rail. Pop. 5682.
It is one of the oldest towns in Silesia; its town hall dates
from the 16th century, and it has a Roman Catholic church
built in the 13th century and restored in 1862. The town has
sandstone and gypsum quarries, breweries and woollen mills,
and cultivates fruit and vegetables. Löwenberg became a
town in 1217 and has been the scene of much fighting, especially
during the Napoleonic wars. Near the town is the village and
estate of Hohlstein, the property of the Hohenzollern family.
LÖWENSTEIN, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of
Württemberg, capital of the mediatized county of that name, situated under the north slope of the Löwenstein range, 6 m. from Heilbronn. Pop. 1527. It is dominated by the ruined castle of the counts of Löwenstein, and enclosed by medieval walls. The town contains many picturesque old houses. There is also a modern palace. The cultivation of vines is the chief industry, and there is a brine spring (Theusserbad).
Löwenstein was founded in 1123 by the counts of Calw, and belonged to the Habsburgs from 1281 to 1441. In 1634 the castle was destroyed by the imperialists. The county of Löwenstein belonged to a branch of the family of the counts of Calw before 1281, when it was purchased by the German king Rudolph I., who presented it to his natural son Albert. In 1441 Henry, one of Albert’s descendants, sold it to the elector palatine of the Rhine, Frederick I., and later it served as a portion for Louis (d. 1524), a son of the elector by a morganatic marriage, who became a count of the Empire in 1494. Louis’s grandson Louis II. (d. 1611) inherited the county of Wertheim and other lands by marriage and called himself count of Löwenstein-Wertheim; his two sons divided the family into two branches. The heads of the two branches, into which the older and Protestant line was afterwards divided, were made princes by the
- ↑ See D. D. Addison, Lucy Larcom; Life, Letters and Diary (Boston, 1897).
