Introducing the Power Loom to America, Lowell & Appleton Bring the Large Scale Manufacture of Cotton to the United States

In 1813, Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, Paul Moody and others introduced the power loom and the manufacture of cotton on a large scale to the United States, founding the Boston Manufacturing Company. By doing so they introduced the Industrial Revolution to the United States. At this time steam engines were scarce in the U.S., so American textile mills had to be driven by water power.

In 1814 the Boston Manufacturing Company built its first mill beside the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, housing an integrated set of technologies in spinning and weaving that converted raw cotton all the way to finished cloth. This was the first integrated spinning and weaving factory in the world. The partners used plans for a power loom that Lowell smuggled out of England, as well as trade secrets from the earlier horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory, of Beverly, Massachusetts, which was the first cotton mill built in America. Patrick Jackson was the first manager of the BMC with Paul Moody in charge of the machinery. The Waltham mill was the forerunner of the 19th-century American factory. 

Following the success of the first mechanized textile mill in the U.S.,  Appleton and others purchased the water-power at Pawtucket Falls, founding the Merrimac Manufacturing Company. The settlement that grew around these factories developed into the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, of which in 1821 Appleton was one of the three founders. Lowell also pioneered the employment of women, from the age of 15–35 from New England farming families, as textile workers. These women became known as the Lowell mill girls. Women lived in company run boarding houses with chaperones, and were involved in religious and educational activities. In a pamphlet entitled Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell. Printed for the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Merrimack River, privately printed for Appleton in Lowell in 1858, Appleton wrote of the mills: "The contrast in the character of our manufacturing population with that of Europe has been the admiration of most intelligent strangers. The effect has been to more than double the wages of that description of labor from what they were before the introduction of this manufacture."