Lyddie, Chapter 8: Boardinghouse Rules and the River That Stopped the Mills

In chapter 8 of the novel Lyddie, Lyddie wakes to her new life as a mill girl in Lowell.

Boardinghouse dining room. Lowell National Historical Park

What happens in the chapter

• The boardinghouse is loud — so loud that Lyddie, in the attic room she shares with five girls, first thinks the bear has come back. Once the others leave for the mill, she helps the keeper, Mrs. Bedlow, and at breakfast meets Amelia, Betsy and Prudence.
• Told the mills won't hire her in her old clothes, Lyddie reluctantly lets Amelia and Prudence take her shopping, spending the last of Triphena's money on a new dress and boots.
• That evening she moves to the third floor with the three girls, and is shocked to learn the boardinghouse — part of the mill — has rules: church on Sunday and bed by 10:00 pm.
• The next day Mrs. Bedlow takes her to the mill, where she signs a one-year contract with the Concord Corporation and is soon ready to start in the weaving room.

Was it real? Boardinghouse rules

Yes. Workers got regulations both for the mill and for the boardinghouse, because management wanted control over every part of their lives:

• church attendance was required;
• boardinghouse doors were locked at 10:00 pm;
• workers were expected to behave "morally."

The rules served management, which wanted rested, obedient workers. But they also calmed parents' fears: a supervised home with a keeper watching over their daughters may have persuaded some families to let them go. Above all, Lowell was meant to be a model city that would never become like Manchester, England, where workers lived and toiled in filth and poor health.

Boott Cotton Mills regulations. Lowell National Historical Park

Middlesex Company boardinghouse regulations. Lowell National Historical Park

Mill worker Mary S. Paul wrote to her father on April 12, 1846:

"Now I will tell you about our rules at the boarding house. We have none in particular except that we have to go to bed about 10. o'clock. At half past 4 in the morning the bell rings for us to get up and at five for us to go into the mill. At seven we are called out to breakfast are allowed half an hour between bells…"

Historian Edward Jay Pershey (1990) describes company-owned boardinghouses leased to older women, who ran them as shared homes with meals and laundry for girls generally 13 to 22. Carefully supervised houses, strict rules and peer pressure reassured reluctant parents.

Lyddie shared a room like this with Betsy, Prudence and Amelia; boardinghouse bedrooms were crowded and offered little privacy. Lowell National Historical Park

Was it real? When the river rose, the mills stopped

In the novel, Mrs. Bedlow expects the girls home early for breakfast because the river is too high and the wheels are slowing — a holiday for them. Could that happen?

Yes. Lowell's mills were built before electricity could power machines. Their thousands of machines ran on water power from the Merrimack River:

1. Investors built a dam on the Merrimack before the first mill opened.
2. The dam sent the river into canals that carried water straight to the mills.
3. Water poured into the mill basements, turning giant waterwheels.
4. The wheels drove gears, pulleys and belts that powered the machines.

But when the river flooded, water backed up into the basements and drowned the wheels, which could not turn underwater — so the mills had to stop until the river fell.

Historian Patrick Malone (Waterpower in Lowell, 2009) explains that the power of Pawtucket Falls drew a flood of investment from 1821, turning the area into a booming center of textiles and machine-building, with the canals as the main power source — and that when streams swollen by rain or snowmelt flooded the wheelpits, waterwheels lost efficiency or stopped.

Merrimack Street, Lowell, in 1856. From Ballou's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Chapter 08 - Number 5, Concord Corporation," from the National Park Service Books to Parks series (Lowell National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. Mary S. Paul's 1846 letter (Center for Lowell History) is quoted; Edward Jay Pershey's and Patrick Malone's work is paraphrased. Lyddie is a novel; this page summarizes the chapter. The lesson's questions are left out, as are a photograph credited to the Tsongas Industrial History Center and portraits of guest authors; rewritten in hubnx's own words.