Lyddie, Chapter 14: Ills and Petitions — Mill Work and Lung Disease

Mill workers who were sick or injured went to the Corporation hospital. Drawing of Lowell Hospital from the 1850 Plan of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts (Sidney & Neff; Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center).

This page is part of the National Park Service's Books to Parks guide to Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie, set in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.

What happens in the chapter

• Lyddie recovers enough to go back to work, though not fully healed, determined to pay off her family's debt.
• Her friend Betsy develops the racking cough that comes from mill work. Amelia urges Betsy to see a doctor and says she herself plans to leave the mills; when she goes home to visit her family in January, she doesn't come back.
• Brigid, a new girl and an Irish immigrant living in the neighborhood called the Acre, joins the weaving room, and Lyddie is asked to train her. Lyddie is prejudiced against her, complaining that Brigid is afraid of the machines, can't handle simple tasks, and slows her down.
• Talk of the ten-hour petition returns, and Betsy signs it. Her cough worsens; she moves to an easier job, then stops working, and is sent to the hospital until her family takes her home to Maine. Lyddie knows she won't be back — and thinks about signing the petition for girls like Betsy.
• Luke Stevens brings news that Lyddie's brother Charlie is fine, and a package: a letter from Ezekial Freeman, who has reached Montreal with his family, and a fifty-dollar bank note. Lyddie deposits it and writes to her mother to ask how much the family owes, hoping at last she has saved enough.

Did many mill workers get lung disease?

Yes. Making cloth released bits of cotton dust and lint into the air of closed factory rooms, and workers breathed them in. Over time, cotton built up in some workers' lungs with devastating results. The "cotton cough," or brown lung disease, could not be cured, and scientists didn't begin studying it until the 1930s. Their research gave scientific weight to workers' demands for protection from what are now understood as the health hazards of cloth production.

The evidence:

• A booming town (1845). Henry Adolphus Miles, in Lowell As It Was, and As It Is, described how new streets, houses, stores, churches, canals and mills sprang up: "within the ten years (1831-1841) the population of the town was multiplied six-fold."
• A worker's letter (1845). Sally Rice wrote to her father on September 14, 1845: "You surely cannot blame me for leaving the factory so long as I realized that it was killing me to work in it." She had gone expecting to earn more than at housework, but feared losing her health, "which is all I possess on earth."
• A modern description. Charles Levenstein, Gregory DeLaurier and Mary Lee Dunn (The Cotton Dust Papers, 2002) describe byssinosis, or brown lung, as a disease of cotton mill workers caused by breathing cotton dust, with chest tightness, shortness of breath, coughing and wheezing that do not ease even after exposure ends and keep worsening in retirement.
• Why it took so long to recognize. Historian Janet Greenlees (When the Air Became Important, 2019) explains that with no named disease tied to cotton dust, and symptoms resembling bronchitis, pneumonia and tuberculosis, doctors, workers and reformers could suspect the cause but not prove it, which delayed recognition of the hazard.

Questions to write about

• Opinion: Lyddie forgets that only months earlier someone patiently taught her the job. Compare how Diana trained a new worker with how Lyddie trains Brigid. Which would you rather learn from, and why? Use concrete examples and sensory details.
• Informative: Using the park's accounts of Irish immigration, explain why Irish people were moving to Lowell and what their lives were like when they arrived.
• Narrative: Describe losing a friend — a real or imagined experience (teacher discretion advised).

See it yourself

Lowell National Historical Park tells the history of the Acre, and the Public Health Museum in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, covers 19th-century diseases.

Sources

• National Park Service, Lowell National Historical Park: "Lyddie: Chapter 14 - Ills and Petitions," from the series Lyddie - Books to Parks.
• Primary sources it quotes: Henry Adolphus Miles, Lowell As It Was, and As It Is (1845); Sally Rice, letter to her father, September 14, 1845 (Vermont Historical Society, Hazelton Rice Papers).
• The source spells Miles's middle name "Adophus"; it is corrected here.
• Secondary sources it cites, paraphrased here: Levenstein, DeLaurier and Dunn, The Cotton Dust Papers (2002); Greenlees, When the Air Became Important (2019).
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.