LowellArticle Free Pass Lowell, city, Middlesex county,
northeastern Massachusetts, U.S. It lies at the junction of the
Concord and Merrimack rivers, 25 miles (40 km) northwest of
Boston. It was the nation’s first planned industrial town. The
site was originally settled in 1653 as a farming community known
as East Chelmsford. Beginning in the early 19th century, this
village grew to become a major cotton-textile-manufacturing
centre because of an abundance of waterpower from the
Merrimack’s Pawtucket Falls (32 feet [10 metres]) and the
completion of the Middlesex Canal link to Boston in 1803. By
1824 the locality was crisscrossed by a canal system that served
numerous cotton-textile mills along the Merrimack River. The
community was incorporated as a town in 1826 and was named for
Francis Cabot Lowell, a pioneer textile industrialist who was
influenced by the organizational reforms of Robert Owen. (See
also Factory life and rules at Lowell.) The town’s growth was
further sustained by the completion of the Bos