Why I Love Lowell

By Jacqueline Malone

I’ve lived in Lowell longer than any other place—ten years longer than I lived in my home state, Tennessee, for the first 21 years of my life. Both Tennessee and Lowell have their own strong ties to my heart. But I recently left Lowell to live in Brooksby Village, a retirement community in Peabody, and the loss I feel about Lowell is fresh.

There is so much I love about Lowell, its history, its mill girl stories, its cultural ethnicity, its amazing canals and rivers, its lovely old architecture. I’ve lived here twice, first when I worked for Wang Laboratories. I stayed for several years after Wang closed because I’d bought an amazing house on Nesmith Street. It had been owned by the Stevens family, a fabric brand-name I knew because, when my children were young and my husband and I were both in graduate school, I made most of their clothes.

The lovely old house had, as they say, “good bones” though it was in terrible shape when I bought it, but with its 14 rooms it was a perfect place to share with my newly married daughter, Robyn, and her husband, Marty. When Marty was in college, he worked summers for a home construction company, and so he took a large part of a year to work and supervise restoring the house. In the process he found many wonderful elements that had been hidden or unfortunately changed. For example, the entrance room had the stairway to the second floor and two doors, one under the stairwell leading to the dining room and the other to the living room. But the doors were weirdly spaced, not only because the one under the staircase was almost hidden, but a long wall hid a large room that separated the living room from the dining room. Marty discovered the reason the spacing seemed weird. In that wall was a lovely and untarnished set of pocket doors. The light coming from the windows in the newly opened room made the whole first floor more inviting, and the door under the stairwell was seldom noticed. Even when the pocket doors were closed, which seldom happened, you could see, in their prominence and beauty, that they lead somewhere more important than the solitary door to the extreme right that led to the living room. I used the room as a library. Two walls were covered in bookshelves, the third wall was all windows, and the fourth wall with its pocket doors was open. A comfy sofa made it a great reading space.

I also loved the stained-glass window on the stairway landing. It was the coat of arms of the Stevens family. My grandmother’s maiden name was Stevens, though coming from Tennessee it was improbable that she was related to the Lowell Stevens. Still, I loved that window, and I loved the fact that I got to live in the same house with my first grandchildren, Rachel and Jake.

But I finally got tired of taking the train to Boston and walking to Cambridge where I worked first for Lotus Development Corp. and then IBM after IBM purchased Lotus. I moved to Wakefield, and my mother came to live with me because my father had died. But I’m sad every time I pass the place where the house once stood, I see the parking lot for the funeral home next door.

When Mom died and I retired, I moved back to Lowell, partially because it was near both my children—my son lived in Andover and my daughter in Chelmsford—and partially because I loved Lowell.

I bought a condo on the river. It had 13-foot ceilings, five windows that were almost nine feet tall and a sliding glass window on the Juliet balcony in my bedroom. All the windows overlooked the Merrimack, which was about 50 feet away. Every morning I checked the river to see if it had changed during the night, and it often had. When rain fell on New Hampshire and Massachusetts streams, a day later those streams emptied into the Merrimack causing water to rise, covering dozens of tiny rocky isles where ducks, geese, seagulls, cormorants, an occasional heron or a rare egret or even a swan stood.

The Merrimack had many surprises. The one that made a cold winter walk rewarding was what I called the ice chandeliers. They formed on twigs and very low branches of trees below the walkway when river water rippled and formed tiny splashes that a drop landing in frigid temperatures quickly froze. Another drop landed on the first and then another and another until the ice chandelier took shape. The only reason I wanted really cold weather was to see those chandeliers!

I also loved the Lowell Walks program (founded by the founder of this web site, Richard Howe). To me, local history is always more interesting than national or international history, because you can see the soil it took place on and because you can often see the local aspects of national history, such as the textile revolution.

One of the more fascinating Walks was one delivered by a Cambodian woman. A Pol Pot refugee, she described how, on arriving on American soil, groups were formed and sent to separate places across the nation so that no one community was over-burdened in helping the newcomers. She talked about how Lowell seemed different from many other places because it had been so welcoming. Word spread and as a result, many refugees left the cities and towns where they had been sent and moved to Lowell, and local politics changed because of the involvement of the Cambodian community. Today city councilors and a recent mayor have come from the Cambodian community.  And the Cambodian community is one of dozens of groups that support the delicious ethnic restaurants that make Lowell a center for trying new foods.

Lowell’s history made my mother’s textile story relevant to textile history. When I was nine months old, our farmhouse burned to the ground along with everything in it, leaving my parents with a few cows and a couple of horses but otherwise destitute. So for years my dad tried to get his equilibrium financially. Finally when I was in eighth grade, he got a Gulf Oil franchise to run a service station in Nashville, ironically a city next door to the small community of Old Hickory, Tennessee, home to a Dupont rayon factory where my mom had once worked as a “mill girl.” What was good for the economy of Old Hickory may have been a blow to Lowell as the textile industry bloomed in many parts of the country.

But Lowell is resilient. It’s now a national historic park with textile museums, art galleries, the fantastic Merrimack Repertory Theater, the festivals like the folk music festival, a winter festival, Points of Light cultural festivals, and the myriad programs for adults and children, even infants, presented by the Pollard Memorial Library. As the motto goes, “There’s a lot to like” (or is it love?) “about Lowell.”

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Jacquelyn Malone worked as Senior Web Writer/ Editor at IBM and Lotus Development Corp., as an adjunct taught both technical and scientific writing and editing at Northeastern. She also writes poetry and has won a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship Grant in Poetry, is the author of a chapbook titled All Waters Run to Lethe, and has been published in numerous journals, including Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Lowell Review. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and have appeared on the website Poetry Daily.