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In 1996, I led a creative writing workshop for the Hellenic Culture Society of Lowell. For the first session I asked the participants to do an exercise. Everyone would contribute one line on the theme of his or her mother’s kitchen. When we had all the individual lines, I took…
Read More »On January 7, 1889, Mayor Charles D. Palmer delivered his inaugural address to the two branches of the City Council (the Common Council and the Board of Aldermen). The Mayor covered many topics in his remarks, from city finances (cash in the treasury as of Dec. 31, 1888: $59,265.27 [a…
Read More »In a ceremony on Thursday, October 1, 1942, at 3 p.m., Rear Admiral W. J. Carter, (S.C.) U.S. Navy, presented to F. A. Flather of the Boott Mills a red, white, and blue pennant representing the Army-Navy Production Award for high achievement in the production of military material needed for…
Read More »This is an excerpt from The Big Move: Immigrant Voices from a Mill City (Loom Press, 2011), edited by UMass Lowell history professors Bob Forrant and Christoph Strobel. The book includes nine interviews, selected from the many conducted by the historians and their team for an ethnographic study of Lowell commissioned…
Read More »Following is an excerpt from an interview with Fred Faust, who has worn a lot of hats and coats in Lowell since he came to town as a radio reporter at WCAP. In 2003, historian Mehmed Ali, then on the staff of Lowell National Historical Park, sat down with Fred to…
Read More »Writer and painter Chath PierSath, a former Lowell resident who still lives in the region, crossed the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979 with members of his family on the way to Aranyaprathet Refugee Camp. With the help of his brother and aunt, he and his sister came to America in 1981,…
Read More »Arguably Lowell’s most prominent historical figure, Benjamin F. Butler published his memoirs in 1892 under the title “Butler’s Book.” A. M. Thayer and Co., Printers, Binders, & Book Publishers of Boston, offered the autobiography to subscribers, not an unusual system in that day. The book is 1,154 pages long, counting…
Read More »Edited by Tuyet-Lan Pho, Jeffrey N. Gerson, and Sylvia R. Cowan, “Southeast Asian Refugees and Immigrants to the Mill City: Changing Families, Communities, Institutiions—Thirty Years Afterward” was published by the University Press of New England in 2007. Among the contributors to this collection of essays is Leakhena Nou, a former…
Read More »Sara Swan Griffin, author of “Quaint Bits of Lowell History,” published “Little Stories About Lowell: Romances and Facts of Earlier Days” in 1928. The book was produced by the Butterfield Printing Company. Following is an excerpt from the chapter “The Canals of Lowell.”—PM . “The Pawtucket Canal almost surrounds Pawtucket…
Read More »Before the Lowell Folk Festival, before Winterfest, before the Southeast Asian Water Festival. Click on image to enlarge.
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