Boston Part One

We have parked ourselves in a very nice park outside of Boston. We could not get closer than 30 miles away, but the park provided us with all the information we needed to get into town. More about that later.

We returned to Concord (very near the park) and visited the local Concord Museum. They told us this is the actual lantern used by Paul Revere on his famous ride. Maybe it is...and maybe it isn't...but I took a photo of it anyway.
I was impressed with the former residents of Concord. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne. Pretty heady stuff. Their lives were all intertwined by family, work, church, friendship. Emerson was a friend of Alcott's father, a respected educator in his own right, and I have my own theory about Louisa May's feelings about him though he was much older than she was.

Concord is also the location of the Alcott home. Ed opted out, but I toured the place where she lived and wrote Little Women among other books. It's the only historical residence I've visited where we were ushed into each room and didn't have to stand behind ropes or peek in doors. The rooms are filled with the personal belongings of the family. There were so many moms bringing their little girls to take the tour. It was very charming.

Concord is a very exciting town for amateur historians. There's just so much to see. Number one on the list is the National Heritage Museum. We had been to the North Bridge and the Manse but wanted to see what the National Park Service has in Concord. There's a wonderful multimedia presentation on the Revolution that puts it all in order.

The MacLean's of Maine, who were so gracious with their time while we were there, suggested we visit Lowell, MA. It was a fascinating visit!

The National Park Service has designated Lowell a historical site and taken over some of the places we visited. It's part of the Historial America preservation and it's so well worth seeing.

Lowell was a seat of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. A group of weathly Bostonians decided to invest their money in textile factories and selected Lowell as the location. What remains today are the brick buildings that were built in the first half of the 19th century. It was a working class community for more than 100 years.

They needed water to run factories and Lowell provided that.

The Boote Cotton Mills are staffed with National Park Service Rangers. The museum on the second floor tells the history of the area, the factories, and the people who worked in them.

The first floor is a working museum. There are 90 machines making a variety of fabric patterns. They fire them up and you have the opportunity to experience a texile mill in operation. The noise is deafening! and the whole building vibrates! The Boote factory had 1000 operating machines.

Who staffed these factories? Mill girls, of course. They were mostly farm girls who came from surrounding areas, lived in company provided housing and by company defined rules. They were paid by the piece, so the machines never slowed down. There are testimonies to the damage to hearing, blood pressure, and lung disease. They worked 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week. When the girls left, the factories employed new immigrants from Ireland and Eastern Europe. And so was born the system of strikes and unions.

The heyday of the mills were done by 1900 and the last textile factory closed in Lowell in the 1950's. Today the large brick buildings are being turned into condos, apartments, and lofts, and Lowell is seeking revitalization.

We also visited the American Textile History Museum. It gives the visitor a new way of thinking about fabric: how the patterns get on it, the texture into it, the materials used to produce it, and the ways in which we use it. The exhibits are wonderful. I was still so taken with our visit to Boote Cotton Mill that I had to take this photo of some of the other machines used in production.

Lowell is also home to a beautiful quilt museum. The current exhibit is of quilts made in Massachutes. No photography allowed, but Ed turned off his flash and got this picture.

The last stop in Lowell - the Whistler House Museum of Art. The home is the birthplace of James McNeill Whistler who's best known for painting a portrait of his mom. They don't have any of his paintings and it was the least impressive of the places we visited in Lowell.

And so...into Boston we went. We drove 25 miles to the Alewife subway station, floundered around buying tickets, and made our way to the Kennedy Museum and Library and later Boston Common...Boston's version of Central Park.

Boston, being the capitol of Massachutes, has a State House. We've tried to visit the capitols of most states we've been in, so we made our way there. It overlooks the Common.

Security was tight here, unlike Vermont, but everyone was very friendly as we piled all buzzer activating stuff into little trays so we could enter.

This is the Hall of Flags, a very large and impressive great hall with three tiers of flags representing every city in Massachutes.

The House of Representatives, very regal...

...and the Senate chamber with a decidedly colonial feel.

The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Lots of memories for me. (Darned if I know why this photo came up sideways - I tried uploading it more than once and it kept turning.) The button in the center that says, "If I was 21 I'd vote for Kennedy" - I wore one of those my freshman year in college. That was before they lowered voting age to match draft age saying if you were old enough to serve you were old enough to vote.

This is the studio in which the Kennedy/Nixon debates took place.

I didn't remember that we had red and blue states, but I do remember sitting up all night watching the returns with no call until the next day. California went red...!

JFK's office and chair and the old tv cameras. Kennedy was the first to do live press conferences.

There are videos of his most famous speeches, a great focus on his legacy - the Peace Corp, the space program, mental health reform, and the arts. The film on the Cuban Missle Crisis is very well done.

The poignancy of this family photograph speaks for itself.

The lower level of the museum overlooks Boston Harbor and his personal boat is outside.

The JFK Library and Museum is an interesting place and well worth a visit. It's focus is on the man and his legacy but is not as indepth as other presidential libraries we've visited. We would have appreciated a tie to world history of the time and explanations of who was in his cabinet and what roles they played.