The Downtown Lowell Anti-Slavery and Underground Railroad District is located at the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River. These 34 Sites are presented with brief descriptions and links to the Lowell Cultural Resources Inventory Reports, Related Stories and Web Maps. Guided by these maps, one can take a walk through the City while learning our history.
In the 1840s and 1850s, Lowell seemed an unlikely community for freedom seekers, assistants, and safe-places on the Underground Railroad. However, this busy northern textile center with its small black community dominating the local barber shops and hairdressing salons, three anti-slavery societies, half a dozen anti-slavery churches, several abolitionist newspapers, and established railroads and stage routes to Canada provided a good location.
Although the stories of some freedom seekers have been preserved, including Nathaniel Booth, Weston Fisher, and Edwin Moore who stopped and settled in Lowell, the number of slaves that passed through Lowell on their way to freedom may never be fully known.
Many of the pre-Civil War commercial buildings and churches in the Downtown Lowell District affiliated with Lowell’s Underground Railroad have survived.
Map 1 Begins on Market Street at the site of the Lowell Manufacturing Company which produced high-end broadloom carpets. The route moves on to stories of Freedom Seekers and their assistants, black owned local businesses, anti-slavery newspapers and churches.
Map 2 Takes us through the Boott Manufacturing complex, whose female textile workers, managers, and investors supported the anti-slavery movement, meeting halls where pleas for support from leading abolitionists were heard, and on to Ladd and Whitney Monument and Memorial Hall, reminders of the terrible conflict of the Civil War.
Map 1. Downtown Lowell Anti-Slavery and Underground Railroad District, Sites 1-15, overlaid on the City atlas of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1879, by Griffith Morgan Hopkins Jr., (Publisher) (Cartographer), F. Bourquin (Frederick), b. 1808 (Lithographer). Plates D. UMass Lowell Libraries, Center for Lowell History, Atlas Collection.
#14 Brooks (Artemas) Planing Company (Demolished). Location: 19 Hurd Street (Business and Home). 1834-1846 First Planing Mill in Lowell. Artemas Brooks was an abolitionist, member of the Free Soiler Party and the Torrey Committee, and Freedom Seekers assistant - providing a safe-place at his home. Lowell Cultural Inventory Report
#15 Appleton Block (Demolished. Location: 174 Central Street. 1842 “True Wesleyan” (anti-slavery) Office, publisher Rev. Orange Scott 1844-1851. “Lowell Offering" and “New England Offering” Office, editor Harriet Farley (Torrey Committee) 1849-1853. “Lowell American” Office, editor William Stevens Robinson (wife: Harriet Hanson), one of the most radical Massachusetts anti-slavery journalists. Lowell Cultural Inventory Report
#16 Spaulding Row. Initial owner: Sidney Spaulding. Location: Central Street opposite Market Street. 1834 Sidney Spaulding, supporter Abolitionist Movement, organizer Free Soiler Party. Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society Office, founder Direxa (Claflin) Southwick and Secretary Sarah Clay. Lowell Cultural Inventory Report
Map 2. Downtown Lowell Anti-Slavery and Underground Railroad District Sites, 16-35, overlaid on the City atlas of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1879, by Griffith Morgan Hopkins Jr., (Publisher) (Cartographer), F. Bourquin (Frederick), b. 1808 (Lithographer). Plate B with detail from Plate A lower right. UMass Lowell Libraries, Center for Lowell History, Atlas Collection.
