Helen Whittier: The Woman Who Ran a Lowell Textile Company

Helen A. Whittier, from Frances E. Willard's Occupations for Women (1897), via the Internet Archive.

In Lowell's mill era, women made up much of the workforce, but the corporations themselves were run on 19th-century lines, with a man at the top. Helen Augusta Whittier was the exception. She ran her own mill and is considered the only woman ever to own a major textile manufacturing company in the United States — just one achievement in a life of civic leadership and work for women's rights and suffrage.

Early life

• Born in Lowell in 1846 to Moses Whittier and Lucindia Blood; of her siblings, only her older brother Henry survived to adulthood.
• Educated unusually well for a woman of her time: Lowell High School, then Lasell Female Seminary (now Lasell University), studying art and art history.
• The family business: her father, an overseer in the cloth-dressing rooms of the Merrimack and Boott mills, started making loom harnesses, rope and twine. That grew into the Whittier Mill, still standing on Stackpole Street.

Running the mill

• Taking over: Moses died in 1884, having handed the company to Henry. Henry died unexpectedly in 1888 of Bright's disease (nephritis). With no other heirs, Helen, 42, became president and treasurer of the Whittier Manufacturing Company. Her cousin Nelson superintended the mill's 70 workers and later took the treasurer's title; she led for 13 years.
• Expanding south: despite the Panic of 1893, she grew the company. After the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, she opened a mill on Georgia's Chattahoochee River, near cotton and cheaper, less-regulated labor — a move most northern mills later copied. An Atlanta paper said she chose the site herself and flipped the switch that started the new mill.
• From Lowell: as many Lowell owners ran their firms from Boston, she stayed in Lowell while Nelson's family moved to manage the Georgia mill. She joined the Middlesex Mechanics Association, where her father had been treasurer, and served on its committee to found the Lowell Textile School.
• Stepping down: in 1901, after Paul Butler — son of former governor Benjamin F. Butler — became a major shareholder, she left the presidency. Butler soon closed the Lowell mill and moved production to Georgia.

A Whittier Mills letterhead, Chattahoochee, Georgia, 1901.

A life of civic work

• Artist: after the seminary she taught porcelain painting at the Lowell Evening Drawing School, and showed a Brussels carpet of her design at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
• 1868, age 23: co-founded a women's literary society, the Charles Dickens Club (after the author's recent Lowell visit), later the XV Club for its number of members.
• Age 32: founding board member of the Lowell Art Association, one of the oldest incorporated art associations in the country.
• 1884: with one other woman and six men, founded the Channing Fraternity, a Unitarian group that aided the poor and held open meetings, lectures and concerts.
• 1896: first president of the Middlesex Women's Club, which grew past 600 members. Women's clubs offered civic education and a voice to women who still couldn't vote.

Women's rights

After selling the company she moved to Boston and worked for women's rights on a larger stage:

• 1903: joined the General Federation of Women's Clubs and, with author May Alden Ward, founded and edited its first publication, the Federation Club Bulletin.
• The next year until 1907: president of the Massachusetts State Federation of Women's Clubs.
• 1916–1919: state director of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, which had campaigned for the vote since 1870.

Helen Augusta Whittier. Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Legacy

She died in Boston in 1925, aged 78, and is buried with her family in Lowell Cemetery.

• The Lowell Textile School grew into the Francis College of Engineering at UMass Lowell.
• The Lowell Art Association lives on at the Whistler House Museum of Art.
• The state federation created the Helen A. Whittier scholarship at UMass Amherst for business students in Managerial Economics.
• Whittier Mill Village is one of 17 historic districts in Atlanta, and the original Lowell mill on Stackpole Street now houses the Lowell Housing Authority.

Sources

Based on "Helen Whittier," Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service, drawing on UMass Lowell Library, Lowell Cemetery, the Lowell Land Trust, The Pittsburgh Post and Harvard Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The 1897 engraving and the 1901 letterhead are in the public domain.