The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night. Mayor Dan Rourke was absent and Councilors Wayne Jenness and Corey Robinson participated via Zoom. The brief agenda yielded a 58-minute-long meeting that handled business expeditiously and without controversy. Rather than dig into this week’s meeting, today I’ll revisit an item from the October 7, 2025, council meeting, a report on the city’s 311 system.

The document presented to councilors was in response to three previous council motions. It explained that much of the 311 team’s efforts over the first six months have been identifying and fixing bugs and improving the flow of information through the system.

The 311 system consists of a non-emergency phone number, a website interface, and a mobile application that allows residents to request services or report quality of life issues. The system also harvests data from these requests that can be used to better manage city operations.

The 12-page report provides a lot of statistical information about the system. I’ll highlight three items:

Method of Submission:

53% of requests are made by phone
27% are made through the website
19% are made on the mobile app
and a handful are from email or walk-ins.

Top Ten Types of Requests:

Pothole – 1108
Pothole (DPW/INT) – 897 (I assume someone in DPW submitted these)
Broken recycling cart (DPW/INT) – 799
Missed trash pickup – 621
Broken recycling cart – 547
Broken trash cart – 524
Missed recycling pickup – 260
Missed yard waste pickup – 181
Bulk items/dumping – 125
Streetlight repair – 98
Trees in public way – 98

Request by Council District:

District 5 (Scott) – 985
District 3 (Belanger) – 969
District 7 (Yem) – 963
District 2 (Robinson) – 822
District 1 (Rourke) – 743
District 8 (Descoteaux) – 713
District 4 (Jenness) – 700
District 6 (Chau) – 633

The report closed by stating that the 311 system will eventually be integrated into the new Enterprise Asset Management system that’s supposed to be operational by the end of 2025. This will allow school and other building work orders to be integrated into the same 311 system and its reporting and data functions.

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The Lowell Sun reported this week that the Markley Group has withdrawn its petition to increase the amount of diesel fuel and diesel fuel generators it maintains at its South Lowell facility (“Markley withdraws diesel-fuel petition from council agenda”). At a previous council meeting, Attorney Bill Martin, who represents Markley, asked the council to delay scheduling the public hearing to give Markley more time to complete some of the remediating tasks they had promised, but with a strong tail wind of neighborhood opposition to the proposal, the council went ahead and scheduled the public hearing for this coming Tuesday, October 21, 2025.

Procedurally, Markley has the right to withdraw its petition without prejudice which means it can refile it at any time with no penalties due to the previous submission.

When this came up two weeks ago, councilors refrained from stating how they would ultimately vote on the petition, but their comments that night, taken as a whole, suggested the petition would be rejected. By withdrawing it, Markley lives to make its case another day, with that day, not coincidentally, falling sometime after the November 4, 2025, city election.

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This week’s example of “there’s always a Lowell connection” can be found in an October 10, 2025, Boston Globe article, “N.H. lawmaker calls for removal of Hannah Duston statue, which memorializes violence against Native Americans.”

Just east of Concord, New Hampshire, on a small island at the confluence of the Contoocook and Merrimack Rivers, there is a statue dedicated to Hannah Duston. Here’s the story behind the statue: In the spring of 1697, 39-year-old Hannah Duston lived with her husband and their children on the family farm on the north bank of the Merrimack River in what is now Methuen but was then Haverhill. One day while Mr. Duston and the children worked in the fields and Mrs. Duston remained in the house, caring for the couple’s thirteenth child, a weeks-old infant, a Native American raiding party attacked the farm. Mr. Duston and the children escaped to a neighboring garrison house, but the attackers captured and kidnapped Mrs. Duston, her infant, and a local woman helping with the child. The attackers and their captives then proceeded on foot north through the wilderness bound for Canada. Along the way, the Native Americans murdered the captives who could not keep up, including the infant who was fatally slammed against a tree after he wouldn’t stop crying.

Eventually the group rendezvoused with other Native people, including the families of the raiders, on a small island at the juncture of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers. Most of the Native fighters departed on another raid leaving two behind to guard Mrs. Duston and two other captives (another woman and a 13-year-old boy who were both captured elsewhere). Approximately eight Native American women and children also remained on the island.

That night, as the Native people all slept, Mrs. Duston awakened her fellow captives, seized a hatchet from one of the sleeping Native men, and used it to kill him and all the other Native people on the island. Next, Duston destroyed all but one of the canoes that the Native people had left behind and then fled downriver in the remaining canoe.

To put this in historical context, this was 21 years after King Philip’s War, a fight between English colonists and Native Americans, which was the deadliest conflict in the history of the North American continent in terms of the percentage of the population killed on both sides. As is evident from the Duston story, violence and brutality continued after the war ended with the colonial government even offering cash bounties to anyone presenting the scalp of a Native person. In this context, before escaping the island on which she had been held, Duston scalped the Native people she had killed and took those gruesome artifacts with her in the canoe.

The escapees encountered English settlers in Dunstable and eventually returned to their homes. Duston redeemed her scalp bounty but then returned home and lived in relative obscurity until she died at age 97.

Nearly two centuries later, in 1874, the City Solicitor of Lowell, Robert Boody Caverly, launched an effort to memorialize Hannah Duston by erecting a statue of her on the Merrimack River island from which she had escaped. Caverly raised $6,000, mostly from affluent Lowellians and then hired William Andrews, another Lowellian who was by profession a cemetery monument carver, to create the statue of Duston which is now the center of controversy. Attorney Caverly was also a poet, playwright and historian. Among his works was a book, The Heroism of Hannah Duston Together with the Indian Wars of New England.

It’s no coincidence that Hannah Duston’s renaissance came at a time when American expansionism caused brutal conflict with the Native Americans in the west (the battle of Little Bighorn came two years after the unveiling). By equating Hannah’s ordeal with the conflict in the west, it provided a more virtuous context for the United States government’s genocidal campaigns against Native people in the post-Civil War era.

However, my purpose in relating this story here today – besides highlighting the Lowell connection – is to remind readers that history is messy and is best understood in shades of gray rather than in black and white. Duston’s violence towards her captors can only be assessed in the context of the murder of her infant by those captors or their colleagues just hours earlier.

To see photos of the Duston statue and related items, check out this item on richardhowe.com.

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Charlie Gargiulo’s memoir of growing up in Lowell’s Little Canada neighborhood (Legends of Little Canada) was recently reviewed on the Literary Titan and Readers’ Favorite websites. Also, on March 4, 2026, Charlie will give a talk on the book at Boston’s West End Museum. More about that when the date comes closer. Legends of Little Canada which I previously reviewed on my website, may be purchased online from Loom Press.

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The latest volume of Resonance, the Franco-American literary journal based at the University of Maine includes translations to English from the original French of five poems by Lowell physician and poet Joseph H. Roy (1865-1931). The translator of the poem was Louise Peloquin, a frequent contributor to richardhowe.com, and the biographical essay accompanying the poems was written by Paul Marion and Janet (Roy) O’Neil, the poet’s granddaughter. Here is a link to the article.

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The group striving to save the Smith Baker Center is holding a fundraiser on Thursday, October 23, 2025, from 7 to 9 pm at the Worthen House Café at 141 Worthen Street in Lowell. More information about the event is available here.