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By Root 858 0

and white birches.” Along the way, “strange new wild flowers” were there for the taking.13 Meanwhile, Pittsburgh was shrouded in a dark cloud of soot and ash. Its people were suffering, too. By the middle of the century, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commissioned a report on ventilation and chimney tops, finding that the coal emissions had a deleterious effect on health. “The smoke, unless carried away and diluted in the upper regions of the atmosphere or consumed, is at all times injurious to health,” wrote Morrill Wyman, a future physician to Teddy Roosevelt among others. “When bituminous coal is consumed . . . the black flakes of soot pass off from the chimneys and float in the atmosphere. This matter then falls upon the roofs of buildings and on everything else that is exposed to it. It enters houses, covers furniture, and soils clothing.”14

Summing up Wyman’s report’s conclusion, a magazine editor wrote that “no one should be suffered to throw smoke or other impurities upon the atmosphere we ‘breathe,’” thus backing Wyman’s questioning of “whether any manufacturer or corporation should be allowed to produce such an amount of evil” as the air pollution was causing.15 Still, at least one Pittsburgh doctor, who perhaps freelanced for cigarette companies in his off-hours, maintained that the soot and smoke “only go throat-deep” and, furthermore, that fire and smoke “correct atmospheric impurities.”16

Compared with Pittsburgh or Manchester, in the early days Lowell was practically Shangri-La. “Nothing appears to be kept secret; every process is shown, and with great cheerfulness,” Davy Crockett wrote of his 1834 experience. “I regret that more of our southern and western men do not go there, as it would help much to do away with their prejudices against these manufactories.”17

Even Ben Brierley, a working-class Manchester writer who did not normally promote factory life, focused on the excellence of the environment for workers and other humans. “There’s a bit o’ comfort, becose we no’ choked wi’ soot, an’ fluss, an’ reech, an’ bad smells, an’ a general thickness o’ air,” he wrote through his dialect character, old Ab.18 Thanks to waterpower, the air was nice, the houses were a clean white, the trees were healthy, and the sky was blue.

chapter 4

Prescribing for the Globe Itself

LOWELL’S CLEANLINESS did not come without a price, however. The owners of Lowell’s factories, a loosely affiliated group of Yankee businessmen known as the Boston Associates, had to permanently alter the rivers they used for power. Over the decades between the town’s founding and the middle of the century, they built an enormous machine, a system that eventually spread over 103 square miles of waterway. They saw nothing wrong with their use of the river’s water as a commodity for producing power.1 One historian summarized that

realizing that nature could not be depended upon for continuous water power at maximum capacity which was needed for full realization of their productive ability—summer droughts and spring freshlets interfering with that goal—the Boston Associates built a series of canals, trenches, and dams at the very headwaters of the Merrimack.2

The looms and the town were the front end of a much greater system that was directly connected to an entire region’s hydrology, climate, topography, and geology. James B. Francis, head engineer of the Proprietors of Locks and Canals Corporation, built a machine that was one hundred miles long and contained millions of acre-feet of water. Its sole purpose was to supply power to a series of waterwheels at Lowell and the other sites run by the Boston Associates. Far upstream, Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire, acted as a huge storage battery of potential power that could be tapped to smooth out power flow, particularly in the summer months. When Francis sent a message that he needed more water, several days passed before it arrived in Lowell.3

The enormous contraption had parts, like any other machine, but bigger. They were dams, canals, new turbines,