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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
In 1988, the National Park Service and Center for Archaeological Studies at Boston University were asked by the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission to investigate the grounds of the former Boott Mills boarding houses off French Street (one remains today, known as the Patrick J. Mogan Cultural Center), and the Kirk…
From a list included in “The Lowell Board of Trade Year Book, 1911-12,” whose president was Harvey B. Greene. Articles Made in Lowell . “Acids, Advertising Novelties, Ammunition Hoists, Ale, Army Duck, Art Needle Work, Asbestos Machinery, Automatic Time Tables, Automobile Accessories, Automobile Parts, Awnings and Tents, Axminster Carpets, Badges,…