Lowell, Massachusetts is the marvel of the American Industrial Revolution. Its buildings are among the most robust and important in the northeastern United States. This entire city, purpose-built for the production of cotton textiles, grew up in the two decades between 1820-1840 along the banks of the Merrimack and Concord Rivers 20 miles north of Boston.
Forty-Five years after working on the proposed masterplan for the Lowell National Historical Park I returned in 2021, not with my T-Square but with my camera, and began making photographs of the mill buildings and the canal structures.
My photographic compositions are structured through the lens of my architectural training. Lowell, a city of tall buildings, bold architectural and sculptural forms delights me. The hard chiseled surfaces of the granite canal walls and the crisp shadow lines of the brick mill buildings call out to be photographed. In these structures I see beyond these sturdy facades and imagine each brick, stone and clapboard being slowly put in place by hand to give form to this place that drove the development of America. In Lowell I am constantly stopped, again and again, by the beauty of these structures; of their immense importance and enduring majesty.
My title for this project pays homage to the 10,000 mill girls who worked in these buildings. Their literary publication, “The Lowell Offering”, was widely circulated and read throughout New England in the early 19th century.