Living on the Boott

Lowell, Massachusetts was the first fully planned industrial city in the United States, and the Boott Mill, established in the 1820s along the Merrimack River, stood at the center of this bold experiment in industrial capitalism. For decades, the company-owned boardinghouses that housed the mills' workers were as much a part of the Lowell system as the looms themselves: a managed, closely supervised domestic world where the rhythms of mill life extended from the factory floor into every corner of daily existence.

Living on the Boott brings this vanished world back to life through rigorous historical archaeology. Drawing on excavations conducted at the Boott Mills boardinghouse complex, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry examine the material remains of the men and women who lived and worked in Lowell's textile industry from the early nineteenth century through its long decline. Through painstaking analysis of ceramics, faunal assemblages, tobacco-related artifacts, and other recovered objects, the authors reconstruct the daily lives, diets, domestic routines, and social relationships of successive generations of boardinghouse residents―from the young "mill girls" recruited from rural New England who made Lowell famous, to the Irish immigrant workers who increasingly replaced them as the century progressed.

The result is a richly documented social history written not from official records alone, but from the objects people actually used, discarded, and left behind. The book illuminates how class, gender, ethnicity, and labor intersected in the intimate spaces of the boardinghouse, and documents the profound changes in living conditions as the Lowell system evolved and the workforce transformed. A landmark contribution to historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, and the history of American labor, Living on the Boott demonstrates the unique power of archaeological evidence to recover the lives of those too often overlooked by conventional historical sources.

STEPHEN A. MROZOWSKI is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is also the founding director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research. A specialist in historical archaeology, urban archaeology, and the archaeology of capitalism and colonialism, Mrozowski has led major research projects across New England and beyond. His work at the Boott Mills boardinghouses was among his earliest and most influential contributions to the study of industrial-era working-class life.

GRACE H. ZIESING is a historical archaeologist with a Master's degree in Archaeology from Boston University and more than twelve years of professional experience in historical archaeology and cultural resources management. A member of the Society of Professional Archaeologists (SOPA) and a contributor to the technical literature of the Society for Historical Archaeology, she has worked on significant CRM projects across New England and California.

MARY C. BEAUDRY (November 25, 1950 – October 20, 2020) was one of the most influential historical archaeologists of her generation. Professor of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Gastronomy at Boston University from 1980 until her death in 2020, she was a foundational scholar whose research encompassed historical and industrial archaeology, material culture studies, household archaeology, gender, and the anthropology of food. Remembered by colleagues for her dedication to "unveiling unwritten lives," Beaudry was cited more than 5,500 times across the scholarly literature and trained generations of historical archaeologists. Her work at Lowell represents one of the most celebrated chapters of her career.