Though her Lowell experience was only a brief few years, my 2^nd great grandmother Charlotte Hicks was a prototypical Lowell Mill Girl. In 1849, at 15 years old she journeyed from Sackville, New Brunswick Canada to a boardinghouse in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was likely Charlotte traveled to Lowell with her neighbors, Cyrus and Rhoda Snell and family, along with nine other young farm women from Sackville. The young women all worked for the Massachusetts Cotton Company in the thick of the Lowell textile mills, and Mrs. Rhoda Snell was their boardinghouse matron.^{1 2}

The Snells were encouraged to come to Lowell to run one of the many company owned boardinghouses. The boardinghouses accommodated the droves of the young working women that the mills required to be successful. It was not surprising that Cyrus Snell in particular was recruited as he was a known successful textile manufacturer and clothier in Sackville.³

In addition, Rhoda Snell urged her husband to move their family to Lowell. She wanted a superior education for her six children, a known opportunity in Lowell. She also wanted to uproot her husband from his successful Sackville business in order to further their strong Latter-Day Saints faith and ultimately move to Salt Lake City.⁴

By the 1850 U.S. Census the Snell family and the Sackville women who followed or traveled with them to Lowell were living in a Massachusetts Cotton Company’s boardinghouse. In 1850 Charlotte Hicks was named on the census in Lowell living with the Snells at their boarding house. They lived right next door to another Sackville family, the Bryants, who also worked there. However, tragedy struck this small contingent from Sackville. In June 1851 the Snells’ youngest child Lucy died of croup.  Also, in August 1851 Sarah Bryant died due to pregnancy complications while at work at the Massachusetts Cotton Company.^{5 6}

The Beginning of the Lowell Cotton Industry

The city of Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, one of the founders of the group of financiers that birthed the enterprise that planned and gave rise to the city. In 1850 the city of Lowell was at the height of its development as a novel and successful experiment in social-industrialization. 

Lowell was a center of cotton cloth product manufacturing. Initially named East Chelmsford the area began development in 1822 as a place specifically identified and developed for massive cotton manufacturing. “In 1822 the Merrimack Manufacturing Company began the building of the first of the factories at East Chelmsford, known as Lowell by 1826.”⁷

The Boston Manufacturing Company, also known as the Boston Associates, was a cadre of Boston financiers, including Patrick Tracy Jackson a descendant of the Edward Jackson family of Newton, Massachusetts, Nathan Appleton and Francis Cabot Lowell.⁸ The company had earlier created a series of mills in Waltham MA. Having outgrown Waltham the company selected East Chelmsford for their next enterprise.⁹ The purposefully created town was laid out and planned by the company.^{10 11}

The Lowell Social and Industrial System

Their Lowell project combined a social system of young women, like Charlotte Hicks, drawn from the countryside for its workforce, combined with cotton producing machinery and waterpower to produce cotton items.¹²

“The factories had no character as yet; they won their reputation from the fresh, healthy girls who worked the machines. These spinsters carried their morality and their standards living with them. They were simply farm girls or daughters of poor professional men who worked in the mills for a period. They were in no sense a proletarian population. Most of them were there only to better themselves or their families. They had left homes all over northern New England – in 1840 only one-eighth came from Massachusetts.”¹³

The waterpower ingredient in this novel formula consisted of a system of canals fed by rivers with dropping elevations. The canal system grew over several decades as the prosperity of the mills increased. Cotton item manufacturing machinery, powered by water turbines at the bottom floor, filled six-story mill buildings. In these factory buildings each integral step in cotton manufacturing was accomplished under one roof, instead of at multiple locations as had been the previous production process in colonial America. 

Lowell’s water power system was ingenious and massive. Water from the rivers fed a canal system intentionally built to direct water to turbines that, through a system of massive gears transferred power to pulleys that powered the machinery, the looms and other machines, required for cotton production.¹⁴

The National Park Service has preserved some of the mill buildings machinery. We viewed one room where a great number of looms operated off of such a system of pulleys. When the looms were activated they all could operate at the same time and did so noisily with a very loud clattering.

By the mid 1800s, “Massive five and six-story brick mills lined the river for nearly a mile…By 1850 almost six miles of canals coursed through the city. Operating on two levels, they drove the waterwheels of 40 mill buildings, powering 320,000 spindles and almost 10,000 looms and giving employment to more than 10,000 workers.”¹⁶ What an amazing experience for a 16 year old Canadian farm girl like Charlotte to see such a large industrial complex and to participate in such a novel enterprise.

That was the Lowell Charlotte Hicks inhabited after her move there from Sackville Canada. She was part of the novel social system employment schema where young women were selected as the predominant work force. What a change that was for a 16 year old country girl. A review of Lowell’s 1850 census shows that Charlotte was one of the youngest girls in that workforce.

The women and girls were fed and housed by the company, as well as carefully watched over by more mature women, housemothers employed by the company for that purpose. Considering themselves well paid, the young women were also exposed to more culture and education than was possible in the rural areas they came from, taking time after up to 14-17 hour workdays to educate themselves, Their workday was sometimes “only” 14 hours, 4:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.¹⁷

“Within these girls there burned a strong desire for culture. Many were supporting themselves at schools like Bradford Academy for half the year; others went into teaching for a few months…They formed circles for evening study, among them groups to learn French, ancient languages, moral science, botany, literature, etc.”¹⁸

The Lowell arrangement for these young women was so novel for that era that writers and political leaders such as Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Whittier, Emerson, and Andrew Jackson visited Lowell to see it for themselves, and their  comments were mostly favorable. One wrote: 

“They are taken in, as it were, to a philanthropical manufacturing college, and then looked after and regulated more as girls and lads at a great seminary, than as hands by whose industry profit to be made out of capital.”¹⁹

Charlotte Hicks and the Snells after Lowell

Moving to Lowell must have been a huge eye-opening experience for Charlotte Hicks, filled with hard work, exposure to new ideas through education, and an opportunity to earn a good wage in a growing industry and a booming town. Charlotte’s time here was short, about a brief two years, much like the time many of the other girls and women spent in the Lowell mills. 

After the deaths in the Snell and Bryant families the Snell family and their contingent of Sackville workers including Charlotte Hicks, and the Bryants, moved back to Sackville for a short period. Soon, in March 1852, both the Snell family and multiple Hicks family members entered the United States. Charlotte Hicks married Lee Scott, a future Civil War veteran, in September 1853. A bit over a year after they married, Lee Scott swore allegiance to the United States in Walworth County Wisconsin. 

The Snells considered staying in Wisconsin. Their extended family members encouraged them to stay. Ultimately the Snells heard a louder call, and successfully took the long and very dangerous trail to Salt Lake City, home of the Latter Day Saints. 

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Footnotes

1. 1850 United States Federal Census, Lowell, Middlesex, Massachusetts; Roll: M432_327; Page: 249A; Image: 110 ↩︎
2. Note: Process to determine where Charlotte Hicks lived and worked – In 1850 United States Census for Lowell, reviewed the 4 families prior and post to the dwelling Snells and company resided in given the census taker walked from dwelling to dwelling; with this information reviewed the 1850 City of Lowell Directory where each family was recorded and found they were all working at Massachusetts Cotton Mill Company and living in Massachusetts Boardinghouses; Adams, George, The Lowell City Directory 1851, Oliver Marsh, Lowell, 1851, pgs multiple, https://libguides.uml.edu/early_lowell/Directories#s-lg-box-wrapper-24833170 ↩︎
3. Stimpson, Cory, Family Stories of the Bairs and Robertsons: Cyrus Snell, https://gbrfamilystory.blogspot.com/2013/06/cyrus-snell-1809-rhoda-barnes-1819.html ↩︎
4. Stimpson, Cory, Family Stories of the Bairs and Robertsons: History of Cyrus and Rhoda Barnes Snell, https://brfamilystory.blogspot.com/2013/06/cyrus-snell-1809-rhoda-barnes-1819.html ↩︎
5. Stimpson, Cory, Family Stories of the Bairs and Robertsons: History of Cyrus and Rhoda Barnes Snell, https://brfamilystory.blogspot.com/2013/06/cyrus-snell-1809-rhoda-barnes-1819.html ↩︎
6. New England Historic Genealogical Society; Boston, Massachusetts; Massachusetts Vital Records, 1840–1911, pg 75, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2101/images/41262_B139021-00075?queryId=60928621-cf16-40d1-b978-c2e885f9fd5f&usePUB=true&_phsrc=siv15513&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true&_gl=1*ns2try*_up*MQ..*_ga*OTg2NDU3NjA4LjE3OTE5OTQ1NTg.*_ga_4QT8FMEX30*czEwZGY2YzAyLWMxNGItNDE5Ni04MGZhLTRhMDQ4MzM5MjBhZSRvMSRnMSR0MTc5MTk5NDU5MyRqMjQkbDAkaDA.*_ga_LMK6K2LSJH*czEwZGY2YzAyLWMxNGItNDE5Ni04MGZhLTRhMDQ4MzM5MjBhZSRvMSRnMSR0MTc5MTk5NDU5MyRqMjQkbDAkaDA.&pId=6233680 ↩︎
7. Allan Macdonald, A Commercial Utopia, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1937), p. 39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/360145?origin=crossref&seq=3 ↩︎
8. Edith Putnam and James Putnam, The Honorable Jonathan Jackson and Hannah (Tracy) Jackson their Ancestors and Descendants, p. 28, Marvin, Boston, 1907. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Hon_Jonathan_Jackson_and_Hannah_Trac/uPARAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=RA1-PA28&printsec=frontcover ↩︎
9. Thomas Dublin, Lowell: the Story of an Industrial City: a Guide to Lowell National Historical Park and Lowell Heritage State Park, Lowell, Massachusetts, p. 21, 30, Division of Publications, National Park Service, Washington D.C., 1992. https://archive.org/details/storyofindustria0000unse/page/30/mode/2up ↩︎
10. Thomas Dublin, Lowell: the Story of an Industrial City, p. 32. https://archive.org/details/storyofindustria0000unse/page/32/mode/2up ↩︎
11. Allan Macdonald, A Commercial Utopia, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1937), p. 38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/99ff0ca3-800d-3fd5-8699-a0b7a30bb470?origin=crossref&seq=2 ↩︎
12. Allan Macdonald, A Commercial Utopia, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1937), p. 38-39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/99ff0ca3-800d-3fd5-8699-a0b7a30bb470?origin=crossref&seq=2 ↩︎
13. Allan Macdonald, A Commercial Utopia, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1937), p. 42-44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/99ff0ca3-800d-3fd5-8699-a0b7a30bb470?origin=crossref&seq=6
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14. Thomas Dublin, Lowell: the Story of an Industrial City, p. 45-47. https://archive.org/details/storyofindustria0000unse/page/45/mode/1up?q=320%2C000
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15. Lowell Canal System. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/hhh.ma0543.sheet.00002a/
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16. Thomas Dublin, Lowell: the Story of an Industrial City, p. 15. https://archive.org/details/storyofindustria0000unse/page/14/mode/1up?q=320%2C000
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17. Thomas Dublin, Lowell: the Story of an Industrial City, p. 51. https://archive.org/details/storyofindustria0000unse/page/51/mode/1up?q=320%2C000 ↩︎
18. Allan Macdonald, A Commercial Utopia, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1937), p. 47-48 https://www.jstor.org/stable/360145?origin=crossref&seq=11
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19. Allan Macdonald, A Commercial Utopia, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1937), p. 41, 43-44, 57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/360145?origin=crossref&seq=7 quoting Anthony Trollope, North America (Philadelphia 1862) 1, 274. ↩︎

© 2026 Elizabeth Scott Wright, Bruce Wright Esq, LL.M