Lyddie, Chapter 7, South to Freedom: The Road to Lowell and a City Built Overnight

Lowell National Historical Park's Books to Parks series pairs chapters of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie with the real history of the Lowell textile mills. In chapter 7, Lyddie sets out for Lowell.

The Boott Cotton Mills, Lowell. Lowell National Historical Park, public domain.

The chapter

Before Lyddie leaves, Triphena gives her new boots and five dollars for the stagecoach. Lyddie thanks her and promises not to forget her, but she means to walk: if Ezekial could walk north to freedom, she reasons, she can walk south to find her own. Her feet soon give out, and at a tavern she learns the Lowell stage comes at the end of the week, so she works for the tavern keeper in exchange for a room until it arrives.

The coach is crowded, and the other passengers look down on her homespun clothes. When it sticks in the mud and the men cannot free it, Lyddie climbs out and shows them how, getting soaked and dirty. The grateful driver offers to take her to the boardinghouse his sister runs. Lowell amazes her with its size, crowds and noise, and her life as a mill girl begins at boardinghouse Number Five on the Concord Corporation.

Fact check: was Lowell big, crowded and loud?

Yes. Thousands of young women like Lyddie came to work in the mills and were often amazed by the busy city. Rows of three-story brick boardinghouses lined the fronts of the mill complexes, each made up of several five-story buildings, and the pounding of machinery could be heard behind every factory window. The streets were full of dress shops, candy stores, bookstores and jewelers, and construction never stopped as the mills expanded and the city raced to keep up with its growing workforce.

Writers of the time were astonished. Henry Adolphus Miles wrote in 1845:

"New streets were opened, houses and stores were put up, churches were erected, canals were dug, manufacturing operations were extended, and within the ten years (1831-1841) the population of the town was multiplied six-fold. The increase was without parallel in any place, in any country…"

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, in The Stranger in Lowell (1845), described:

"a city springing up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night, stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry and painted shingles, filling the angle of the confluence of the Concord and the Merrimac (rivers) with the sights and sounds of trade and industry… A stranger, in view of all this wonderful change, feels himself, as it were, thrust forward into a new century…"

The historian Robert F. Dalzell notes that by the 1840 census Lowell had 20,000 people, the second-largest city in Massachusetts, and nine textile manufacturing firms, where in 1821, when the site was chosen, there had been only about a dozen houses beside a thirty-foot fall of the Merrimack River.

"Merrimack Mills and Boarding-Houses," an engraving by O. Pelton, printed by W. T. Goddard. The driver leaves Lyddie at a corporation boardinghouse like these, run by a keeper for the mills. American Antiquarian Society, Mill Girls in Nineteenth-Century Print.

Fact check: were bad roads a real problem?

Yes. The stagecoach beat walking, but a journey could still take several days even in good weather, with nights spent at taverns paying for a meal and a bed. Early New England roads were poorly kept, very bumpy and often flooded in bad weather. They improved by the middle of the 19th century, making travel easier and faster, but country roads were still often rutted and muddy from rain and snow.

One mill worker writing in The Lowell Offering in 1844 reported arriving "safe and sound, after being well jolted over the rocks and hills of New Hampshire."

Harriet Farley, "Letters from Susan," The Lowell Offering, vol. IV, 1844. Center for Lowell History.

Historians add context. Jack Larkin notes that in cold country, winter was traditionally the time for journeys, since sleighs and sleds moved faster over snow than wagons over rutted or muddy roads. Roger N. Parks records that more than 3,700 miles of turnpikes, or toll roads, were built in New England between 1790 and 1820, and many thousands of miles of better-built county and town roads followed into the 1840s, allowing much faster travel.

Stagecoaches were often crammed with passengers while the driver sat out front in all weather. The old stagecoach between Charlestown, N.H., and Springfield, Vt. Library of Congress.

See it yourself

Visitors can learn about stagecoach travel at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, and ride a re-created stagecoach at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

Questions for readers

• Why did the stagecoach driver help Lyddie? Support your answer with facts and details.
• How did Lyddie describe the city, and what past experiences helped her overcome her fears?
• Imagine you are a passenger on the stagecoach to Lowell. Describe the journey using concrete words and sensory details.

Sources

• National Park Service, Lowell National Historical Park, "Lyddie: Chapter 07 - South to Freedom," Books to Parks series. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lyddie-chapter-7-south-to-freedom.htm
• Henry Adolphus Miles, Lowell As It Was, and As It Is (1845); John Greenleaf Whittier, The Stranger in Lowell (1845); Harriet Farley, "Letters from Susan," The Lowell Offering (1844); Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite (1983); Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (1988); Roger N. Parks, Roads and Travel in New England 1790–1840 (1967). Modern historians are paraphrased.
• The source spells Miles's middle name "Adophus"; it is corrected here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.