The Boott Cotton Mills Museum and the American Textile History Museum

The former textile center of Lowell, Massachusetts, now contains two major museums dedicated to an industry whose fame and fate are inseparable from the history of that city, the New England region, and the nation. The Boott Cotton Mills Museum and the American Museum of Textile History have, however, adopted sharply differing approaches to the public presentation of their subject matter. Their respective exhibit development strategies highlight the differences between bureaucratic and charismatic types of authority (as delineated by the German sociologist Max Weber); visitor experiences are predicated on a generation of scholarship on one hand and a wealth of artifacts on the other. These alternatives include pitfalls that neither institution has escaped.

The Boott Cotton Mills Museum opened in 1992 under the aegis of the National Park Service, following a protracted gestation period. The exhibits and related facilities occupy 20,000 square feet on two floors of an 1871–73 textile factory and the adjacent counting house. Professional reactions to the design and content of this noteworthy facility have been decidedly mixed. Boott Mill shared SHOT’s 1993 Dibner Award with two other exhibitions. Some reviewers have pointed out more blemishes than might be expected in an award-winning installation. ¹

Within the former Boott Mill Number 6 a plausible recreation of a 1920s weave room takes up most of the first floor (fig. 1). An impressive array of power looms is driven via belting from overhead line shafts. A few of the 1913–21 Draper Model E looms actually produce cloth; others pantomime the motions of weaving and contribute to an engulfing sensation of industrial cacophony. This immediate plunge into the everyday environment of textile manufacturing is far more dramatic and effective than herding visitors into an obligatory audiovisual orientation session.

Figure 1.

The difficulty of locating sufficient machinery to represent other steps in the cotton manufacturing process was a factor in the design of the weave room at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum. (Photo by James Higgins, courtesy of the Lowell National Historical Park.)

A vestibule preceding the weave room contains text panels that sketch the evolution of the power loom and its place in the larger sequence of cloth production as well its role in the founding of Lowell. Descriptions of the jobs performed by various weave room personnel are immensely informative. The weave room itself is not heavily interpreted. A grouping of looms separated from the principal display by a pedestrian walkway could be used to explain the mechanics of weaving and the duties of workers more fully, particularly during intervals when the main battery of machinery is not in operation.

The second-floor exhibits have less impact than the weave room. Lowell: Visions of Industrial America is staged in a conventional gallery setting where factory windows have been covered and no machinery is set in motion. The large team that developed the exhibit included Park Service personnel and a slew of private consultants. They attempted to translate a cumulative avalanche of scholarly research about Lowell into apprehensible displays. On balance, the interpreters and designers have failed in their task, due in part to a convoluted story line desperately in need of pruning and in part to an exhibit plan that does not display the available materials to best advantage.

The several sections of the second-floor exhibit proceed chronologically from the aftermath of the Revolutionary War to the situation in contemporary Lowell. The space allocated is too small for such an ambitious agenda. An obsolescent multi-image slide show examines the political economy of nineteenth-century industrialization, though it omits the critical legal transformations that underpinned the growth of capitalism. This entire subject could well be addressed in another venue or format, thus eliminating the audiovisual theater and opening up additional room.

What should be the heart of the exhibit, “Lowell’s Heyday, 1823–1924,” is disappointing. The presentation is very strong on the topics of labor history and shop floor experiences, but it deals with textile technology in a haphazard fashion and is unimaginative in...