From Homespun to Factory Cloth
1In 1800, most Americans lived on farms. Many families grew much of their own food, and women and girls often spun thread and wove cloth at home. In many places goods moved slowly over dirt roads, and hauling a wagon of grain to a distant city could cost more than the grain would sell for.
2Over the next decades, new ways of making and moving goods changed this pattern, a shift historians call the market revolution. Samuel Slater had worked in English mills and built spinning machines in Rhode Island from memory. At Waltham and later at Lowell, Massachusetts, investors built mills where water-powered machines turned raw cotton into finished cloth.
3Transportation changed even faster. Before the Erie Canal opened, shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City cost about $100; on the canal it cost about $10. Steamboats carried goods up rivers against the current. Railroads, which could run in winter when canals froze, spread across the country. Farmers in Ohio and Illinois began growing wheat and corn to sell in faraway cities, then used the money to buy factory cloth, tools and other goods.
4Work changed too. Many Lowell workers were young women from New England farms. They lived in company boardinghouses and worked about 12 or 13 hours a day, six days a week, with a factory bell marking the start and end of each shift. Their wages, often a few dollars a week, were their own, and many sent money home or saved it. In 1836, when the companies raised the price of board, more than a thousand workers walked out.
5Harriet Hanson Robinson began working in a Lowell mill at age 10. In 1898, more than sixty years later, she published a memoir about those years. In this adapted passage she recalls the 1836 strike: "When the girls in my room hesitated, I, who was only eleven, grew impatient and called out, 'I don't care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether anyone else does or not.' I marched out, and the others followed. As I looked back at the long line behind me, I felt prouder than at any success I have had since."