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The Town & the City: Lowell before and after The Civil War

Originally created to be a digital archive for Lowell documents from 1826 to 1861, this website has grown to cover many periods and events in Lowell's history.

The Town & the City: Lowell before and after The Civil War

Originally created to be a digital archive for Lowell documents from 1826 to 1861, The Town & the City: Lowell before and after The Civil War has grown to cover many periods and events in Lowell's history.

"No part of the earth's service is more worthy of study, for us, than that on which we live. No part can boast a history more replete with the elements of poetry and romance, — what she has done for the advancement of the mechanic arts, — what she has contributed to the comfort and well-being of civilized mankind, — what her citizens have done, and are now doing, for the preservation of the unity and nationality of America, — the world well knows."
 
— Charles Cowley, Memories of the Indians and Pioneers of the Region of Lowell, 1862.

via GIPHY

 “History is a tale . . . not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.”
                                          Walter Isaacson in Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

"Pawtucket Dam, 1833" (Oil painting on canvas)
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library

 

Navigating this website

The pages on this site and their contents fall into two major categories:

1.) Digitized documents

2.) Other primary and secondary source materials from a variety of collections including images, maps, and books.

Digitized documents -

For many, but not all, of the collections, there is both a webpage describing and listing the documents and an "Inventory" webpage with information/metadata (e.g., date, title, subject, names) including a link to each document. For these collections, there are links to the digitized documents and the indexes for them on the “Documents Collections List & Links” page of the site. In addition, a downloadable EXCEL spreadsheet file is available for each document collection on that page.

The originals of these document collections belong to the City of Lowell, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the Lowell Historical Society. The originals are located at Lowell City Hall and The Center for Lowell History.

These documents were digitized and are presented in the order that existed at the time of digitization. No effort was made to sort, reorder, or categorize. It is not known whether, or to what degree, any sorting, reordering or categorizing has been done over the previous decades. EXCEL spreadsheets and the Search function within the website give researchers the abilities to perform these functions as needed.

Other primary and secondary source materials –

Pages with other primary and secondary source materials, in addition to many other features can be accessed by clicking on the blue buttons on the left between “Documents Collections List & Links” and “Contact us.”

This site is a work in progress and documents and other resources are added on a regular basis.