Rumors of Sainthood: Sarah Shedd of Washington (cont.)
by Ronald Jager

It is about seventy miles, as the turnpike once ran, from Washington, New Hampshire to Lowell, Massachusetts. But in 1813 when Sarah Shedd was born in Washington, a thriving rural town which would never have a railroad but which lay athwart two turnpikes, Lowell, Massachusetts did not even exist. There was only a canal and a small settlement near a large waterfall in East Chelmsford, Massachusetts. But big changes were afoot. The first permanent waterpower textile factory for spinning yarn from raw wool or cotton began in 1790 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and in the next decades dozens of small waterpower spinning mills sprang up on the rivers of southern New

While spinning yarn, wool and cotton, became mechanized factory work, weaving yarn into cloth was still mostly done within the family on a domestic loom. That too began to change about the time Sarah Shedd was born (although the change did not show up immediately in remote towns such as Washington), when Francis Lowell and his partners, the Boston Associates, created a new factory system in Waltham, Massachusetts, with waterpower looms. (Lowell had spent time in England studying textile milling, studying the machinery, and came home with a head full of designs and ambitions; from memory he created new power looms exactly on the British model.) Their fully integrated textile mill began with raw cotton from the South and used waterpower machinery to pick, card, spin, dye, and finally weave the cloth. Meanwhile, of course, many a New England farm girl like Sarah Shedd worked by hand on a loom at home, often using woolen yarn also spun at home but, when they could afford it, increasingly using cotton yarn from the power spinning factories in southern New England.

By 1820 the Boston Associates were on the prowl for a new site, bigger and better with more power. They liked the looks of East Chelmsford and the falls on the Merrimack River, so they quietly bought up the canal, bought the nearby farmland, bought up a few small mills, bought most of the water rights and bought nearly everything else in sight. Then they set about constructing from scratch a system of textile mills, new canals for transportation, then worker housing and, indeed, an entire factory city, again on the British model. Other companies, often with many of the same directors, joined in the activity on that site. Francis Lowell had died by this time, so in 1826 his name was given to the new city that was rising on the farmscape, and Lowell, Massachusetts, it has remained. It was a thoroughly integrated factory system, or set of systems, that they created, and was immediately successful: cotton cloth, gingham and calico, had a huge market and they knew how to make it cheaply. The Boston Associates also put up a machine shop, where they built the machines for spinning and weaving, built the turbines and locks and water wheels, the steam engines and shafts, the gears and pulleys, bells and whistles, and all the factory machinery. By the late 1830s they were even building locomotives in Lowell -- and thus inadvertently began to subvert their own water transportation system. In short, the Industrial Revolution that changed the face of rural New England was sponsored directly by the textile mills. Indeed, many historians believe that slavery itself might have died out in the South as uneconomical if the modern textile mills had not created a vast cotton market that revived the institution. At first, the Lowell factory city was so outrageously successful that by the 1830s the only problem was the shortage of workers to tend the machines. Where could they be recruited?

It is likely that Sarah Shedd responded to one of the hundreds of recruiting posters that were spread throughout the towns of northern New England. This may have been about 1832, when she was nineteen, or even earlier. She had already taught school in Washington, but the details of what else she had done are unclear, although there is one little clue. Sarah's mill friend Harriet Robinson later wrote a book about life in the Lowell mills (published after Sarah's death), and about Sarah she said: "Her parents were in narrow circumstances; but they had endowed her with a good mind, and had given her a fair education, which was supplemegnted by tuition under Mary Lyon, of Holyoke Seminary, one of the first women preceptors of her time." Mary Lyon, in fact, was a well known teacher in several academies in New Hampshire and Massachusetts before she became famous as the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1837, and perhaps the leading female educator of the 1840s. We don't know just where or when Sarah studied with her, but she certainly chose her mentor well. Her studies probably included literature, for

Friends testified that Sarah had ardently desired to continue her formal education, but had been unable to do so. Perhaps she had studied with Mary Lyon before her father died, and his death may have been the reason she could not continue her education, but went to the mills instead. We cannot be sure. We do know that by 1832 Sarah's brother Joseph was 15 and ready and eager for academy work; but there wasn't one in Washington, so it would cost money for him to go elsewhere; and we know that Sarah helped to pay for it. Many young women, some younger than Sarah, went to the mills to help out with family finances, for one thing that a mill job promised was good company and a steady paycheck.

A mill job promised other things as well: a regimented life, incredibly long hours, and a working environment that was noisy, hot, and polluted with lint. There were things on the plus side too: companionship of friends and peers, nearby shops for stylish clothes, rich social life (lyceums, concerts, lectures, lending libraries, literary circles, theater) better than anything imaginable back home on the farm; also freedom from parents and community, pocket money for new clothes and other things, and the thrill of real earnings to take back home. Not a life for everybody -- but a life freely chosen by thousands of young women.

For about twenty-five years (1830-1855) mill life at Lowell was almost exclusively a female life -- with male overseers. Many workers were teenagers and most came, as did Sarah, from northern New England farms. The mill owners had desired a predictable and compliant staff of mill workers (operatives, they were called) that worked together, lived together, and also dined and socialized and worshipped together, and followed the same rules. Perfect role for farm girls -- so the Boston Associates and other mill owners thought -- who had been born and raised among spinning wheels and hand looms on largely self-sufficient farms. The recruiters visited nearly every sizable rural community, put up posters announcing interviews, hired the young women, and arranged their transportation to Lowell, where they were met and conducted to their boarding houses, usually four to a room, and shown the rules. Usually the mill work itself was not physically strenuous and rarely dangerous; but it was long, tedious, in bad air, and uncomfortable. In some cases the amenities of the boarding houses were thought to be so excellent -- fine tableware, nice furniture, piano, sitting room, books, periodicals -- that the public was invited in to admire the facilities. By 1836 Sarah Shedd was one of about six thousand female workers in Lowell. Ten years later, one of ten thousand; and by the time of the Civil War, Lowell had the heaviest concentration of industry in America.

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