Lowell National Historical Park
The Acre: The Irish Build the City They Were Not Meant to Live In
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Transcript
Lowell's founders recruited young Yankee women into carefully supervised housing.
The Irish workers who actually dug much of the early industrial landscape were treated very differently.
Beginning in the 1820s, Irish laborers came to build canals, factories and boardinghouses.
Many were excluded from the corporation housing system.
They created their own settlement in low, swampy ground that became known as the Acre or New Dublin.
The neighborhood developed through family and kin networks.
It also became a target of suspicion from Protestant Yankee elites who associated Irish Catholic immigrants with disorder, poverty and cultural difference.
St. Patrick's Church and other institutions helped the community create stability and identity.
This is an important correction to the shiny version of the planned industrial city.
Lowell's order was unevenly distributed.
The corporations designed housing for the workforce they considered respectable.
Other workers had to build community outside that model.
And yet the Irish were not marginal to the city's creation.
They dug the canals.
They laid foundations.
They performed the construction labor that made the planned city physically possible.
The people least included in Lowell's ideal social system helped build the ideal itself.
The physical environment of the Acre reflected exclusion.
Makeshift housing and irregular streets were not evidence that Irish residents lacked community.
They reflected the fact that the planned corporate city had not planned equally for them.
People responded by building networks around kinship, parish life and local businesses.
That pattern would repeat in American industrial cities for generations.
Immigrant neighborhoods often looked disorderly from the perspective of elites because residents were solving problems the formal city had chosen not to solve for them.