Patrick Malone, the director of the Urban Studies Program at Brown University gave a very interesting and informative talk on the history of the Lowell canal system this afternoon at the National Park Visitor Center as part of the Moses Greeley Parker lecture series. My attentiveness (and presumably that of many of the other 70 or so folks in the audience) was aided by the knowledge that the Patriots were getting trounced by the Ravens in today’s playoff game.

Dr. Malone began his talk by showing a slide of New Lanark, Scotland, a mill town that used a canal that forked off of a river to power cotton factories. While in the United Kingdom, Nathan Appleton visited New Lanark and Malone suggested his observations of that city helped him form a vision that ultimately became Lowell.

Unlike New Lanark where the canal ran parallel and immediately adjacent to the river, Lowell’s geography was much more complex due to the big bend in the Merrimack River and the pre-existing Pawtucket Canal which formed a big loop that encircled downtown and the Acre. After seeing the many diagrams and maps of the canals shown by Malone today, I gained a much deeper appreciation of the geography of the canal and mills of Lowell.

One theme Malone repeatedly returned to was the importance of landscaping along the canals to the mill owners during the 19th century. While the original builders of the mills seemed to dispense with any concern for the environment or natural beauty, their successors were very interested in horticulture and felt that by installing tree-lined “malls” (think National Mall in Washington rather than the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua), they would “ventilate and beautify” the city and make it a more desirable place for their workers to live. Trees continued to be important until the beginning of the 20th Century when the workforce became almost entirely immigrant and the owners dispensed with any expenses beyond the bare minimum to operate the mills.

A second revelation by Malone involved the transition from waterpower to steam power to operate the mills. He said that for many years, he placed that event in the early 1870s when efficient steam engines were widely installed in Lowell. Malone’s opinion has changed now, and he pushes the full transition to steam power back to the late 1880s. He explains the presence of steam engines earlier as supplementary power sources that were used when water power lagged (as in the summer) and that the steam engines and hydro power from the canals formed a type of hybrid power system in the years following the Civil War.

Dr. Malone had much more to say, but those are the major points I took away from today’s gathering. When the weather warms and I can comfortably get out and about amongst the canals with my camera and notebook, I’ll have more to say (and show) on this topic