The Irish got to Lowell, Massachusetts the hard way - on foot. They went there to dig the canals which were to make the town on the Merrimack River the cradle of American's industrial revolution, little over half-a-century after the process began on the other side of the Atlantic. The river was dammed, the canals were dug, the mill races began to turn and the boom that was to last almost 100 years was under way.
On October 8th, 1823, Deborah Skinner was hired as the first mill girl at the Boott Cotton Mills. To work the looms which made the cotton, cheap labour was needed. There was a plentiful supply of young women on farms across the eastern seaboard of the United States. But the work was hard, the day regulated by the factory bell which woke them at 4.30 a.m. and commanded every hour thereafter. By the middle of the 19th century the mills were turning out a million yards of cotton a week.
Today you get to Lowell by dingy MBTA commuter train from Boston's North Station. It is a pleasant city of about 100,000 people, dominated by restored redbrick mills. There is a bar opposite the visitor centre called The Dubliner - mercifully, not an Irish theme bar but an ordinary American eating and drinking place - where you may drink a pint of Guinness in memory of the first wave of immigrants who came here before the potato famine of the 1840s. And at the end of the street a sculpture of a navvy recalls the Irishmen who did the hard work which changed a sleepy little town called East Chelmsford into one of the industrial wonders of the 19th century.
Built a church
The first Irish labourers walked 25 miles a day to get here from Boston. The people who employed them would not house them, and they eventually made their homes on a slope overlooking the town - called the Acre - where they built a church in honour of St Patrick. There were tensions between the Irish and the Yankee millworkers, who saw themselves as socially superior, and these led to demonstrations in the 1820s over the siting of St Patrick's. There were about 500 Irish living in Lowell by the early 1830s, but the Famine brought a much greater influx.
The female mill-workers were a curious mixture of 19th-century wage slaves and emancipated women. They lived away from home and were not dependent on men for their keep. Though they worked cruel hours, there were greater social opportunities in a busy city than a remote farmstead could ever offer. They could spend their money on clothes or save for a dowry, attend plays, "improving" lectures and church services. And they were Yankees, a cut above mere immigrants. They look at you out of old photographs: roundcheeked country girls in full white aprons with hair parted in the centre and tied back, little black laced boots peeping out from ankle-length cotton skirts - the American female in the round before Lycra was invented.
Jack Kerouac
But they and the Irish labourers and later waves of immigrants who followed, French Canadians (including the forbears of Jack Kerouac who is commemorated by a fine public park), Poles, Greeks, Russian Jews, were exploited economically by families who inherited thriving businesses but whose only response to increased competition was to cut wages. By the mid-1920s, the bubble had burst.
St Patrick's still stands on the hill, higher and mightier than the gold-domed Greek Orthodox church which is its nearest neighbour. It looks just like a 19th-century parish church in any Irish town, and that's what it was.
In the church grounds there is a gravestone which reads: "In Memoriam Rev Timothy O'Brien 1791-1855, Rev John O'Brien 1800-1874, Rev Michael O'Brien 1825- 1900, natives of Ballina, Co Tipperary, Ireland , requiescant in pace." Two brothers and a nephew, I presume, came with their raggle-taggle flock to the New World, and put their mark on a Massachusetts hillside.
First communion
These O'Briens, men without women, travelled a long way from their home near the shores of Lough Derg. Today the children being prepared for first communion at St Patrick's are from another immigrant community. They are little American Vietnamese, and their shiny black hair and pigtails represent another strand of the rich tapestry of today's America.
In 1954, Bootts' enormous mill closed down. It is now a finely restored museum which spares the visitor nothing, not even the ghastly noise of the machinery with which people worked 10- and 14 hour days.
Here in Lowell is history with the fast-forward button pressed. In the last quarter of this century, barely 10 years ago, Wang's computer business towered over the economic skyline of Lowell. Now its dominance, like that of King Cotton, is history. And a very large part of Lowell's history is Irish history.