This was something of a last minute stop, decided the day before we left the Boston area. While enroute back to camp one evening we saw the offramp for Lowell and Michael had to stop to see the place. Lowell was one of America's first industrial cities, designed and built solely for the purpose of housing workers and supporting what came to be over a dozen different textile mills along canals tapping into water power from nearby rivers to drive the machinery. When the mills all finally shut down a generation ago the town fell into decline, only to be revived through its naming as a national historical site for its significance to industry in America and the innovative Lowell System of housing workers and creating community for them.

Today, we got to see part of one factory in which the machines run again, using the same system as was used almost a hundred years ago - we got to feel and hear the din of the looms as we walked the factory floor of one of the Boott Mills - so noisy that they recommend hearing protection (yes, it's provided). Upstairs, the upper floors have been converted to a museum where the story of Lowell's development and decline is told, and everyone can learn about the manufacture of cotton textiles that made the area famous and indelibly tied the genteel society of northern merchants to the slaveholders of southern cotton plantations and then to the later sharecroppers after the Civil War.

Leaving the main museum, we walked to a nearby additional exhibit in which the life of factory workers - at first young farm girls and then later immigrants - was recreated in one of the old boarding houses. Although not every building in town could be used as a museum, it was clear the refurbishment has come to Lowell as some of the old factories have been converted to offices, artist studios, and even upscale apartments.

Although the kids at first thought "Oh no, another museum", they all left saying that this one was pretty cool after all, and they had fun using a hand loom to weave some of their own cloth.