Lyddie, chapter 22: the Acre, Lowell's Irish neighbourhood, was real

In the novel Lyddie, chapter 22 takes Lyddie's friend Brigid home to the Acre, the crowded Irish neighbourhood of Lowell, Massachusetts. Fired from the mill, Lyddie looks up the word used against her — "turpitude" — writes two letters to protect Brigid from the overseer who harassed them both, says goodbye to her friends and heads home to Vermont. The Acre she leaves behind was a real place, and the Park Service's companion lesson for the novel looks at what we know about it.

What happens in the chapter

• Lyddie buys a dictionary to understand why she was dismissed.
• She writes one letter to the overseer, Mr. Marsden, and one to his wife, to be sent only if the first does not stop him from having Brigid fired.
• She visits Brigid in the Acre with the letter and two gifts — a primer and Oliver Twist.
• She confronts Marsden with the first letter: if he moves against Brigid, his wife will learn what he did.
• She visits Diana in Boston, finds her managing, and goes home to Vermont.

Was the Acre real?

Yes. The first Irish immigrants came to Lowell in the 1820s. A Catholic parish grew up on a small piece of land that came to be called the Acre. In the 1840s, as families fled the Great Hunger in Ireland, far more arrived, most with very little, and the Acre became packed and noisy, with animals loose in the streets. Fear of Catholics and foreigners kept it deliberately apart from the more prosperous parts of the city, including the mill boardinghouses where girls like Lyddie lived.

The Acre and St. Patrick's Church are still where new immigrants land in Lowell. Mass at St. Patrick's is said in three languages today.

The evidence

A newspaper, 1831. The Portsmouth Journal, reprinted in Niles' Register in Baltimore on August 27, 1831, described a settlement on the edge of Lowell that some called New Dublin: a little over an acre, about 500 Irish people in roughly 100 cabins of slabs and rough boards, seven to ten feet high, each with a stone fireplace at one end topped with two or three flour barrels or lime casks for a chimney. In the middle stood a school built the same way, with one window and a few holes for light and air, holding perhaps 150 children.

Portsmouth Journal, reprinted in Niles' Register, Baltimore, August 27, 1831, page 4.

A memoir, 1898. Harriet Hanson Robinson divided the factory town of 1832 into four classes in Loom and Spindle. The fourth were the Irish labourers — "lords of the spade and the shovel" — whose work built the great mills and whose children soon became mill workers themselves. They lived at first in the Acre, in hundreds of small shanties clustered around a little stone Catholic church, and brought some of their old feuds with them.

A historian's view. The geographer Sallie A. Marston, writing in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in 1988, found that from their arrival in 1822 until well after the Civil War the Irish were Lowell's largest ethnic group, and that their presence alarmed the Yankee majority. The most violent example she cites is the 1831 Yankee attack on the Acre and on St. Patrick's Church, which had been built but not yet dedicated.

Questions to take away

• Why do you think Lyddie finally found the courage to confront Mr. Marsden?
• In chapter 22 Lyddie says the bear has "won." What does she mean, and does it fit her situation?
• Back in Vermont Lyddie notices clean air and a blue sky. Describe a place you love using all five senses.

The Park Service has more on the Acre at Lowell National Historical Park.

Sources

Written from "Lyddie: Chapter 22 — Farewell," Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service, part of the series Lyddie — Books to Parks; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It quotes the Portsmouth Journal (1831), Harriet Hanson Robinson's Loom and Spindle (1898) and Sallie A. Marston, "Neighborhood and Politics: Irish Ethnicity in Nineteenth Century Lowell, Massachusetts" (1988).