Francis Cabot Lowell (businessman)

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Francis Cabot Lowell (April 7, 1775 - April 10, 1817) was the American business man for whom the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, United States is named.

He was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of John Lowell (1743-1802) and Susanna Cabot (1754-1777), and a member of the prominent Boston Lowell family, which included statesman John Lowell, Harvard University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, civil war general Charles Russell Lowell, astronomer Percival Lowell, and poet Robert Lowell.

Lowell attended Phillips Academy, Andover and later graduated from Harvard College in 1793, and on November 2, 1798 married Hannah Jackson in Boston, Massachusetts, daughter of Jonathan Jackson and Hannah Tracy, with whom he had four children; three sons and one daughter.

On a visit to British Isles in 1810-1812 at age 36, Lowell carefully studied the textile industries of Lancashire and Scotland. It appears that he went so far as to make detailed engineering drawings in the evenings, based on mechanisms he observed during the day's factory tours.

Upon his return to Boston in 1813, he joined his brother-in-law Patrick Tracy Jackson and Nathan Appleton to found the Boston Manufacturing Company (or The Boston Associates) in Waltham (1812; factory built 1813-14), the world's first textile mill in which all the operations for converting raw cotton into finished cloth could be performed. With Paul Moody he devised an efficient spinning apparatus and a power loom based on the British model but with technological improvements.

To raise capital for their mills, Lowell and partners pioneered a basic tool of modern corporate finance by selling $1000 shares of stock to the public. This form of shareholder corporation quickly became the method of choice for structuring new American businesses, and endures to this day in the well-known form of public stock offerings.

In 1814, the company built its first mill beside the Charles River in Waltham, housing an integrated set of technologies that converted raw cotton all the way to finished cloth. This Waltham mill was thus the forerunner of the 19th century American factory. Lowell also pioneered the employment of women, and particularly young women from New England farming families, as factory workers, in what became known as the Lowell system. He paid these "mill girls" lower wages than men, but offered attractive benefits including in well-run company boardinghouses with chaperones, cash wages, and benevolent religious and educational activities.

Although he died early at age 42, only 3 years after building his first mill, Lowell left his Boston Manufacturing Company in superb financial health. In 1821, dividends were paid out at an astounding 27.5% to shareholders. In 1822, Lowell's partners named their new mill town on the Merrimack River Lowell after their visionary leader. One of his sons, Francis Cabot Lowell Jr., continued to work in his father's footsteps.

[edit] Further reading

• Robert Sobel The Entrepreneurs: Explorations Within the American Business Tradition (Weybright & Talley 1974), chapter 1, Francis Cabot Lowell: The Patrician as Factory Master (ISBN 0-679-40064-8).