Mill Talk: The Rosy Dawn of Industrialization: Distant impacts by early New England

The environmental impact of industrialization is often imagined as belching smokestacks or noxious effluents. But local pollution is only the most obvious impact of industrialization. Often overlooked are the distant impacts and ‘externalities’ that accompanied mechanized production and the growth of modern cities.

The Waltham and Lowell systems which birthed textile manufacturing in America were highly profitable and spurred a massive influx of investment capital into the sector. Between 1830 and 1840, more than 270 textile manufacturers were incorporated in Massachusetts alone, each equipped with hundreds of machine tools and dozens of hydro-turbines.

The tremendous demand for raw materials – wood, cotton, iron, clay, limestone, granite, etc. – transformed landscape and watershed. The dramatic rise in demand for raw cotton in America and Britain intensified the brutality of forced labor in the American South, expanded the plantation system into Alabama and Mississippi, and prompted war against Mexico. The growing network of factory sites co-produced an extensive network of railroads and canals. The first twenty years of factory building in Lowell alone required clearing more than 25 square miles of forest for structural timber.

In this talk, historical archaeologist Kevin Coffee shares his research on the standing structures commissioned by the Lowell manufacturers and explores some of the most significant wide-area impacts produced by the new industry.