LOWELL'S LABORS LOST

...The Wannalancit Mill, operated for fifty-one years by the family of Ted Larter, was for years the last vestige of the ten corporations that founded Lowell...

...But Lowell School Superintendent Patrick Mogan, the moving force behind the park for more than ten years, vows it will be otherwise...

...American city expressly planned for industry, it set the pattern for the development of dozens of similar mill cities throughout the northeast and marked the country's shift from a rural and agricultural to an urban, industrial economy...

...They never did, The mill owners, who lived in the fashionable Beacon Hill section of Boston, never saw fit to spend their fortunes in the city where they made them...

...As it now stands, a visitor can no longer see the most breathtaking illustration of Nineteenth Century mill life—a working textile mill using old-fashioned shuttle looms—because not a single such mill exists...

...She followed her father and grandfather into the mills, and like other veteran textile workers, she remembers the experience vividly...

...Everything looks so beautiful now," she says...

...The renovation projects, the shops and restaurants are only "props," he says, for telling the real story of the working people of Lowell...

...And the park could be a setting in'which to ask why the shutdowns happened, and why they continue to occur in cities and small towns across the country...

...I think we are trying to make it 'an attraction that is pleasing rather than present hard things...

...Such explanations do not satisfy critics like mill owner Ted Larter, who is concerned about the lack of exhibits of the city's reliance on water power...

...The Park Service has only a tape recording of the noise of the mill floor and is scrambling to buy shuttle looms from outside the city, ironically, in hopes of creating an exhibit of the industry that created the city...

...It closed last October, short on labor and handicapped by its outdated machinery...

...The looms lined the floor beneath fluorescent lights, pounding out fabric, swaying on their mounts, vibrating the floor, and communicating a sense of sinister power through the soles of the feet...

...The two agencies planning the park—the National Park Service and the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission—are setting up a visitors' center in the old mill of the Lowell Manufacturing Company...

...Why did the city act for years as if it were trying to obliterate its past, almost as if the mills had been a foreign presence in the city...

...An exhibit and restaurant are planned for a former boarding house where "mill girls" once lived...

...The Park Service may not have to sanitize history, because the damage may already be done...

...To answer these questions, and to tell the whole Lowell story, would be to question a system that allows corporations to create and destroy cities according to economic demands, not human needs...

...Lowell, Massachusetts, located thirty miles northwest of Boston, was the pastureland for a small farming community on the banks of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers until a group of Boston merchants turned it into one of the country's leading textile cities in the 1820s...

...The park planners say the cosmetic surgery is necessary and point to a series of exhibits that will tell both sides of Lowell's history...

...For instance, a visitor might like to stop into the cultural institutions founded by such wealthy, Boston-educated mill owners as Patrick Jackson and Nathan Appleton...

...upstairs, developers who are eager to cash in on the mill theme arje busy turning the floors into subsidized housing...

...As the first...

...It could finally explore the devastating exodus of the mills from Lowell, an exodus which started in 1918 and continued into the 1950s...

...It could tell about the formation of the first women's labor union and its work for the ten-hour workday and improved conditions in the mills...

...It could tell the story of the Lowell "mill girls" who not only worked twelve-hour shifts and wrote poetry at night for a literary journal, the Lowell Offering, but who also walked out of the mills over wage cuts in one of the first industrial strikes in American history...

...In breathing the humid air and smelling the greasy, oily "mill smell," a visitor realized for the first time what someone like Yvonne Hoar was talking about...

...It is caught in a conflict between those who would present an unvarnished view of what really happened in a turn-of-the century mill town and those who would give visitors a pleasant industrial Disneyland...

...To preserve this history, Congress designated Lowell as an urban historical park in 1979...

...People don't really realize what it was, the hours we put in...

...You may tour Merrimack Street, the city's main commercial thoroughfare, and observe the cheerful prosperity of the renovated Nineteenth Century storefronts...

...I don't think you can expect a Federal agency within the Department of the Interior of the Reagan Administration to talk about the hazards of the free enterprise system," says one park official...

...If Mogan proves right, the present emphasis on the bright side of Lowell's mill history will serve only, as he says, to open the public's eyes to the vibrant ethnic life of the immigrants in the neighborhoods, to the traditions, the culture, the music and family life...

...It's not the same thing as switching on a loom and seeing it work," agrees Fred Faust, executive director for the preservation commission...

...But if you are one of the several hundred thousand people who visit the new $40 million Lowell National Historical Park this summer, you will see quite a different side of Lowell...

...aboard a boat for a trip on the old canals that once supplied the mills with water power from the Merrimack River...

...This risk is real...

...Yet you will not see a working mill room this summer...

...But now, after two years of planning, the Lowell National Historical Park is facing a battle for its soul...

...Why was the magnificent house of Merrimack Manufacturing agent Kirk Boott, the most influential man in Lowell in the 1820s and 1830s, torn down...

...With the exception of the few mill owners with a mind to reform, the owners skimmed their profits from Lowell...

...And that, some fear, is not a likely prospect for the Lowell National Historical Park...

...No Catholic could be promoted to work in the office," she says now, years later...

...But if he proves wrong, the "silver lining" approach to Lowell's history may turn out to be a way of obscuring the darker moments in our past—and a distraction from clouds gathering on the horizon once again...

...The park could present a capsule view of immigrant workers from forty nations struggling with wage reductions and speed-ups in the mills, and high infant mortality and tuberculosis at home in the crowded tenements...

...The list of lost exhibits raises questions: Why were the hundreds of boarding houses torn down for parking lots, making an example now difficult to find...

...But before the closure, when Larter would swing open the wooden doors to the mill's weave room, he revealed the primal character of Lowell...

...Two of the old mills will house exhibits depicting and explaining the collapse of the local textile industry...

...By the turn of the century, one estimate was that three-fourths of the profits—$2 million in the solid currency of the 1900s—was being drained from the city...

...Noise assaulted the ears, with an abrasive quality like the wind and roar of a passing locomotive...

...David Sylvester Yvonne Hoar started working sixty-hour weeks in the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the age of sixteen...

...But it will be difficult to visit the Jackson Museum of Fine Arts or the Appleton Library, because they don't exist...

...Other exhibits are missing as well...

...She remembers the long hours, the low wages, the arbitrary "straw bosses" who gave her extra work after she finished the allotted amount...

...A visitor on a walking tour downtown will eventually be able to stop in an early rowhouse and see a labor exhibit put together by the Lowell Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO...

...I'm afraid the city is turning into what we would like it to be rather than what it was," Larter says...

...You may ride through the downtown on a newly painted trolley and then climb David Sylvester, an Albany newspaper reporter, is a former reporter for the Lowell Sun...

...We aren't going to sanitize history by any means," replies James Brown, acting park superintendent...

...The Greeks, the French, the Italians—we were all minorities then...

...You may walk over to one of the textile mill yards and stare at the vacant, silent, red-brick mill building, thinking it rather peaceful...

...The planners defend the trolley and boat ride as a necessary way of attracting the Boston tourist crowd...

...Nearby will be specialty shops...

...Shops and stores downtown and in key neighborhoods, depressed and run down until only a few years ago, will receive $5 million in renovation grants from the commission to re-create the proper Nineteenth Century atmosphere...

...He says the park will be "the first time the contribution of the working man to America will be recognized by the Government...

...If so, you may miss the story of generations of working people like Yvonne Hoar...

...In eighteen years alone, from 1918 to 1936, 25.000 of Lowell's 40,000 workers were thrown out of work—two-and-a-half times the number of unemployed in Youngs-town, Ohio...

...On the other hand, at its worst, the Lowell park could place a facade over history, offering a glossy, candied version of mill life...

...The Park Service did not have the money to buy the Wannalancit's equipment, and now Larter has sold it all...

...She remembers bitterly the favoritism toward Protestant workers that finally prompted her to organize a small, independent union in the mill's finishing room...

...At its best, the Lowell park could become the first national park for American labor...