‘In the Mills, We Are Not So Far from God and Nature’
Industrialization and Spirituality in Nineteenth-Century New England
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v5i1.82Keywords:
nature and organized religion, green urbanism, environmental history, industrializationAbstract
Beginning in the 1820s, industrialization wrought profound and violent disruptions in the culture of the northeastern United States. Lowell, Massachusetts, grew from a rural village of 1500 people in 1820 to a manufacturing city of 33,000 in 1850. Newcomers found crowds, buildings, and noise spiritually assaultive: one yearned ‘to find myself alone for a brief space, that I might hold communion with my own heart undisturbed’. In response to these yearnings, Lowell’s developers and laborers eschewed artful fabrications of pastoral countryside or wilderness. Instead, they incorporated greenery into canals, factories, and streets, weaving sacred space into industrial urbanism. Writings by Lowell’s ‘mill girls’ detail the spiritual rewards—some actively sought, some serendipitous—of their lives in the city. Although the hopes of the city’s founders and workers that balance could be achieved between mass production of material goods and harmony with nature were not fully realized, the gardens, green spaces, and human ecology of Lowell provide models for sustainable and spiritually fruitful industrialization and urbanism in the twenty-first century.
References
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‘Anneline’. 1842. ‘Evidence of Design in Nature’, Lowell Offering and Magazine 3.2: 32-34.
Bagley, Sarah G. 1840. ‘Pleasures of Factory Life’, Lowell Offering 1.2: 25-26.
———. 1841. ‘Tales of Factory Life No. 2. The Orphan Sisters’, Lowell Offering 1.9: 263-66.
Beecher, Catherine E., and Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1869. The American Woman’s Home (New York: J.B. Ford).
Borgström, Bengt-Eric. 1997. ‘The Way the World Is Going: The Society–Nature Dichotomy in Development Rhetorics’, in Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (eds.), Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 332-46.
Boston, Thomas. 1811 [1720]. Human Nature in its Fourfold State (New York: Evert Duyckinck).
Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Bushman, Claudia. 1998. ‘A Good Poor Man’s Wife’: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England (Hanover: University Press of New England).
Calvin, John. 2001 [1554] Genesis (ed. Alistair McGrath and J.I. Packer; Wheaton: Crossways).
Carlyle, Thomas. 1870 [1829]. ‘Signs of the Times’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York: Appleton): 187-95.
Center for Neighborhood Technology. 2010. ‘Housing and Transportation Affordability Index’, CNT: Sustainable Communities, Attainable Results. Online: http://www.htaindex.org/mapping_tool.php#region=Lowell,%20MA--NH.
Cronon, William. 1996a. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton): 69-90.
———. 1996b. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response’, Environmental History 1.1: 47-55.
———. 2003 [1983]. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang).
Dalzell, Robert F. 1991. ‘The Boston Associates and the Rise of the Waltham-Lowell System: A Study in Entrepreneurial Motivation’, in Wieble 1991: 39-75.
Downing, Andrew Jackson. 1848. The Horticulturalist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 3.1: 1-9.
Dublin, Thomas. 1993 [1979]. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (repr., New York: Columbia University Press).
———. 1994. Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Dunlap, Thomas R. 2004. Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
Eisenberg, Evan. 1998. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Knopf).
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‘Estelle’. 1848. ‘Nature’, New England Offering: 213.
Farley, Harriet. 1841. ‘A Weaver’s Reverie’, Lowell Offering 2.1: 188.
———. 1844. ‘Letters from Susan: Letter Second’, Lowell Offering, April: 169-72.
———. 1844. ‘Letters from Susan: Letter Third’, Lowell Offering, August: 237.
———. 1848. ‘Editorial’, New England Offering, December: 215-16.
‘Farming Life in New England’. 1858. Atlantic Monthly 2.10: 336-41.
Foner, Eric (ed.). 1977. The Factory Girls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1992. ‘Writing, “Race,” and the Difference it Makes’, in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press): 43-70.
Gregory, Frances W. 1975. Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia).
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‘H. F.’ 1841. ‘The Aristocracy of Employment’, Lowell Offering 1.2: 268-73.
‘H. T.’ 1841. ‘Our Household’, Lowell Offering 2.1: 364-65.
Hamilton Manfc. Co. Lowell, Mass. n.d. Cloth Label. Museum of American Textile History. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center For Lowell History.
Hess, Scott. 2010. ‘Imagining an Everyday Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 17.1: 85-112. doi:10.1093/isle/isp152.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1996 [1962]. The Age of the Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage).
Jackson, Frederick T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press).
Jordan, Winthrop D. 2000. ‘First Impressions’, in Les Back and John Solomos (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (New York: Routledge): 33-50.
Larcom, Lucy. 1876. Proceedings in the City of Lowell at the Semi-Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Lowell (Lowell: Penhollow).
———. 1889. A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Boston: Houghton Mif_in).
Laurie, Bruce. 2005. Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Lowell Directory and Business Key. 1849. Lowell Historical Society. University of Massachusetts Lowell Center for Lowell History. Online: http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/lcd04.htm.
‘M’ [identi_ed by Judy Ranta as Marcia Currer or Lucy Larcom]. 1841. ‘Shade Trees’, Lowell Offering 2.1: 233.
Malone, Patrick M. 2009. Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Malone, Patrick M., and Charles A. Parrott. 1998. ‘Greenways in the Industrial City’, Industrial Archaeology 24.1: 19-40.
Marshall, Peter H. 1992. Nature’s Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth (London: Simon & Schuster).
‘Massachusetts Mills–1850’. Steel engraving. Lowell Historical Society. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Lowell History, http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/mi03.htm.
Montrie, Chad. 2004. ‘“I Think Less of the Factory than of my Native Dell”: Labor, Nature, and the Lowell “Mill Girls”’, Environmental History 9.2: 275-95. doi:10.2307/3986087.
Moran, William. 2002. The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth they Wove (New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St Martins Press).
Mrozowski, Stephen A., Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry. 1996. Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
Owen, David. 2009. Green Metropolis (New York: Penguin).
Richards, Peter. 1991. ‘A Study in Community Power: Lowell, 1912’, in Wieble 1991: 265-79.
Robinson, Harriet. 1898. Loom and Spindle (New York: Thomas Crowell).
Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf).
Scoresby, William. 1845. American Factories and their Female Operatives. Harvard University Library Open Collections. Boston: W.D. Ticknor. Online: http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2588721?n=9&s=4&imagesize=1200&rotation=0.
Sigourney, Lydia. 1840. ‘Horticulture’, Godey’s Lady’s Book 21: 179.
Stanton, Cathy. 2006. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Post-Industrial City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
Steinberg, Theodore. 1991. Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
Stilgoe, John R. 1988. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality, and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Thoreau, Henry David. 1862. ‘Walking’, Atlantic Monthly 9 (June 1862): 657-74.
———. 1906a [1849]. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston: Houghton Mif_in).
———. 2000 [c. 1861]. ‘Winter Fruits’, in Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript (ed. Bradley P. Dean; New York: Norton): 233-39.
———. 2004 [1855]. Walden (ed. Jeffrey S. Cranmer; New Haven: Yale University Press).
Whittier, John Greenleaf. 1845. The Stranger in Lowell (Boston: Waite, Pierce & Co.).
Wieble, Robert (ed.). 1991. The Continuing Revolution: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts (Lowell: Lowell Historical Society).
Williams, Raymond. 2005 [1980]. ‘Ideas of Nature’, in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso): 67-85.
Zonderman, David A. 1992. Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press).
‘Anneline’. 1842. ‘Evidence of Design in Nature’, Lowell Offering and Magazine 3.2: 32-34.
Bagley, Sarah G. 1840. ‘Pleasures of Factory Life’, Lowell Offering 1.2: 25-26.
———. 1841. ‘Tales of Factory Life No. 2. The Orphan Sisters’, Lowell Offering 1.9: 263-66.
Beecher, Catherine E., and Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1869. The American Woman’s Home (New York: J.B. Ford).
Borgström, Bengt-Eric. 1997. ‘The Way the World Is Going: The Society–Nature Dichotomy in Development Rhetorics’, in Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (eds.), Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 332-46.
Boston, Thomas. 1811 [1720]. Human Nature in its Fourfold State (New York: Evert Duyckinck).
Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Bushman, Claudia. 1998. ‘A Good Poor Man’s Wife’: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England (Hanover: University Press of New England).
Calvin, John. 2001 [1554] Genesis (ed. Alistair McGrath and J.I. Packer; Wheaton: Crossways).
Carlyle, Thomas. 1870 [1829]. ‘Signs of the Times’, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York: Appleton): 187-95.
Center for Neighborhood Technology. 2010. ‘Housing and Transportation Affordability Index’, CNT: Sustainable Communities, Attainable Results. Online: http://www.htaindex.org/mapping_tool.php#region=Lowell,%20MA--NH.
Cronon, William. 1996a. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton): 69-90.
———. 1996b. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response’, Environmental History 1.1: 47-55.
———. 2003 [1983]. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang).
Dalzell, Robert F. 1991. ‘The Boston Associates and the Rise of the Waltham-Lowell System: A Study in Entrepreneurial Motivation’, in Wieble 1991: 39-75.
Downing, Andrew Jackson. 1848. The Horticulturalist, and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste 3.1: 1-9.
Dublin, Thomas. 1993 [1979]. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (repr., New York: Columbia University Press).
———. 1994. Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Dunlap, Thomas R. 2004. Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
Eisenberg, Evan. 1998. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Knopf).
‘Eleanor Mallows’. 1843. Olive Leaf and New England Operative: 241.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1982 [1836]. ‘Nature’, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays (ed. Larzer Ziff; New York: Penguin): 35-82.
‘Estelle’. 1848. ‘Nature’, New England Offering: 213.
Farley, Harriet. 1841. ‘A Weaver’s Reverie’, Lowell Offering 2.1: 188.
———. 1844. ‘Letters from Susan: Letter Second’, Lowell Offering, April: 169-72.
———. 1844. ‘Letters from Susan: Letter Third’, Lowell Offering, August: 237.
———. 1848. ‘Editorial’, New England Offering, December: 215-16.
‘Farming Life in New England’. 1858. Atlantic Monthly 2.10: 336-41.
Foner, Eric (ed.). 1977. The Factory Girls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1992. ‘Writing, “Race,” and the Difference it Makes’, in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press): 43-70.
Gregory, Frances W. 1975. Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779–1861 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia).
Gross, Laurence F. 1993. The Course of Industrial Decline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
‘H. F.’ 1841. ‘The Aristocracy of Employment’, Lowell Offering 1.2: 268-73.
‘H. T.’ 1841. ‘Our Household’, Lowell Offering 2.1: 364-65.
Hamilton Manfc. Co. Lowell, Mass. n.d. Cloth Label. Museum of American Textile History. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center For Lowell History.
Hess, Scott. 2010. ‘Imagining an Everyday Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 17.1: 85-112. doi:10.1093/isle/isp152.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1996 [1962]. The Age of the Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage).
Jackson, Frederick T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press).
Jordan, Winthrop D. 2000. ‘First Impressions’, in Les Back and John Solomos (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (New York: Routledge): 33-50.
Larcom, Lucy. 1876. Proceedings in the City of Lowell at the Semi-Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Lowell (Lowell: Penhollow).
———. 1889. A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Boston: Houghton Mif_in).
Laurie, Bruce. 2005. Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Lowell Directory and Business Key. 1849. Lowell Historical Society. University of Massachusetts Lowell Center for Lowell History. Online: http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/lcd04.htm.
‘M’ [identi_ed by Judy Ranta as Marcia Currer or Lucy Larcom]. 1841. ‘Shade Trees’, Lowell Offering 2.1: 233.
Malone, Patrick M. 2009. Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Malone, Patrick M., and Charles A. Parrott. 1998. ‘Greenways in the Industrial City’, Industrial Archaeology 24.1: 19-40.
Marshall, Peter H. 1992. Nature’s Web: Rethinking Our Place on Earth (London: Simon & Schuster).
‘Massachusetts Mills–1850’. Steel engraving. Lowell Historical Society. University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Lowell History, http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/mi03.htm.
Montrie, Chad. 2004. ‘“I Think Less of the Factory than of my Native Dell”: Labor, Nature, and the Lowell “Mill Girls”’, Environmental History 9.2: 275-95. doi:10.2307/3986087.
Moran, William. 2002. The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth they Wove (New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St Martins Press).
Mrozowski, Stephen A., Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry. 1996. Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
Owen, David. 2009. Green Metropolis (New York: Penguin).
Richards, Peter. 1991. ‘A Study in Community Power: Lowell, 1912’, in Wieble 1991: 265-79.
Robinson, Harriet. 1898. Loom and Spindle (New York: Thomas Crowell).
Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf).
Scoresby, William. 1845. American Factories and their Female Operatives. Harvard University Library Open Collections. Boston: W.D. Ticknor. Online: http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2588721?n=9&s=4&imagesize=1200&rotation=0.
Sigourney, Lydia. 1840. ‘Horticulture’, Godey’s Lady’s Book 21: 179.
Stanton, Cathy. 2006. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Post-Industrial City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
Steinberg, Theodore. 1991. Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press).
Stilgoe, John R. 1988. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality, and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Thoreau, Henry David. 1862. ‘Walking’, Atlantic Monthly 9 (June 1862): 657-74.
———. 1906a [1849]. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Boston: Houghton Mif_in).
———. 2000 [c. 1861]. ‘Winter Fruits’, in Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript (ed. Bradley P. Dean; New York: Norton): 233-39.
———. 2004 [1855]. Walden (ed. Jeffrey S. Cranmer; New Haven: Yale University Press).
Whittier, John Greenleaf. 1845. The Stranger in Lowell (Boston: Waite, Pierce & Co.).
Wieble, Robert (ed.). 1991. The Continuing Revolution: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts (Lowell: Lowell Historical Society).
Williams, Raymond. 2005 [1980]. ‘Ideas of Nature’, in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso): 67-85.
Zonderman, David A. 1992. Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press).
Published
2011-04-20
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Weiss, J. (2011). ‘In the Mills, We Are Not So Far from God and Nature’: Industrialization and Spirituality in Nineteenth-Century New England. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 5(1), 82-100. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v5i1.82
