An urban park ranger

Transcript: Resi Polixa, Park Ranger at the Lowell National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Our main museum attraction is called the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. The first floor of that museum has a working weave room. It has historic looms. They’re not reproduction looms. They’re from the 1920s. They still run. They still make cloth. When you go into our bookstore downstairs or at the museum, the cloth that we sell there is the cloth that’s made in the museum. And you can walk through that room so you’ll get an idea of all the noise and the vibration of the floors, what the air feels like. You get a very physical sensation when you’re in there. So in terms of significance and why this is a National Park, there [are] a few different reasons, one of the historic significances of Lowell is that this was the first place in the United States where you could go from a raw piece of cotton on the first floor of a factory to a finished bolt of cloth on the top. The whole process was streamlined under one roof in Lowell. You get a whole sense of that in the museum there. Very close by to that museum, we have another exhibit site, another museum, called the Mill Girls & Immigrants Exhibit. That tells you more about the people who were in the factories. Another significant statement of Lowell is that this is one of the first places in the United States where women found employment en masse. Elsewhere in the New England region, there would’ve been other factories where women found employment, but they were in small numbers. But here it was kind of a big concentration of women working here. For many of them this would’ve been their first time away from their parents, away from their upbringing, away from their home. So this is kind of an interesting place for women’s independence in that era because in the 1830s and 1840s there were a few kind of big steps taken for women’s rights and women’s independence and women’s movements. This was one of the places for that where we see that change historically. At that exhibit, you see the boarding house. They all lived in boarding houses when they were here. You can see the recreation of a boarding house and you get to see on the other side how the city of Lowell developed more ethnic neighborhoods as time went on.