Ready for mill work

The Pawtucket Canal in Lowell, Mass., lined with old mill buildings

— Photo by John Phelan

“The New Hampshire girls who came to Lowell {to work in its new textile mills in the early and mid 19th Century} were descendants of the sturdy backwoodsmen  who settled that state….Their grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life…when the beautiful valleys of the  Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails from Canada to the white settlements. Those young women…were earnest and capable, and ready to undertake anything that was worth doing.’’

From A New England Girlhood (1889)