Overseers in Lowell's Textile Mills

Born in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in about 1810, Stephen Moar settled in Lowell and worked as a housewright before obtaining a job as an overseer at the Merrimack Mills in the late 1830s. He worked at the Merrimack and lived in a Merrimack boardinghouse about 35 years. Moar retired around 1870. He died of pneumonia at his residence on Merrimack Street in November, 1876.¹ Moar and his first wife, Hannah, had two children. Ann E., a school teacher, born in 1835 died in the 1860s. A son, John E., born in 1838, worked as a machinist. The son was unmarried and lived at lodging house, Harris’s Hotel on Merrimack Street, where he died of an overdose of morphine, about two years after his father’s death. He had been largely unemployed for several years prior to his death at the age of 40. His stepmother, Hannah Moar, living nearby on Merrimack Street, survived him.²