Talk:Lawrence, Massachusetts
Oops -- Robert Frost was not born in Lawrence, Mass. He may be associated with New England, but he was born in San Francisco.
Some intersting things about Lawrence that I believe are true:
1. Lawrence was a planned industrial city built by a corporation set up for the production of woolen cloth, the Essex Company. It was meant to be a copy of the profitable cotton town of Lowell, Massachusetts some ten-odd miles up the Merrimack River.
2. Many of the investors in the Essex Company were typical of textile investors across New England at the time: members of relatively prominent shipping families looking to diversify their wealth after the highly profitable far east spice trade dried up.
3. Little capital investment was given toward making the mills more productive, e.g. so they could diversify into more profitable items like multi-colored cloths, etc. The failure to make capital investments was partially due to the desire of investors to pay themselves high dividends. Thus the mills competed in terms of price rather than superior quality/value, meaning they had to hold wages down in order to survive.
4. This led to the hiring first of single farm girls and then of even cheaper immigrant labor, including children down to the age of 10 or so.
5. Even with these cost saving measures, competition drove most New England woolen mills into bankruptcy in the 1890s. The American Woolen Company was set up to merge them all together and make them more efficient and to end competition, at least regionally. In other words, it was the classic monopolistic trust of the late 19th century that the Sherman anti-trust act set out to eliminate.
6. However, all the creation of the American Woolen Company did was to stretch out the twilight of low value woolen manufacturing for another 50 years. The savior for the Lawrence woolen industry was government orders for blankets in World War I and II. There was very little other demand for their goods at the prices they had to charge.
7. Lawrence has always struggled financially, not just recently. In earlier years this was because the textile mills were exempt from real estate taxes. Most of the rest of the real estate was tenement houses, mill housing (also exempt) and shops.
8. One silver lining: because its enormous mills were water powered, there is relatively little environmental contamination compared to its historical manufacturing significance.
Bibliography includes Dengler, Khalife and Skulski, "Lawrence Massachusetts" (Immigrant City Archives 1995) Roddy, "Mills, mansions, and mergers : the life of William M. Wood (1982)
Cbmccarthy 17:27, 25 March 2006 (UTC)cbmccarthy