Neighbor city · MA-03
Lawrence
Immigrant City on the Merrimack. Bread and Roses.
A neighbor city in MA-03 (Trahan). Tram lived here as a child after her family arrived from Vietnam. Lawrence's labor and immigrant history is also central to the American story.
Overview
Lawrence was planned. In 1845 a syndicate of Boston textile capitalists led by Abbott Lawrence chartered the Essex Company, threw a stone dam across the Merrimack River, and laid out a city of mills on the land below it. Within a generation the canals were lined with brick factories, the boarding houses were full of Irish and French Canadian and Italian and Polish weavers, and the river was running the largest worsted-wool industry in the United States. In January 1912 the looms stopped. Twenty-five thousand immigrant workers from more than fifty nationalities walked out of the mills and held the city for nine weeks in the strike the country came to know as Bread and Roses. The mills are mostly silent now. The city has reinvented itself as the most Hispanic city in Massachusetts and the second-most Hispanic in the Northeast, a Caribbean and Central American center whose families followed the same paths the Irish and Italians had walked a century earlier.
Tram's connection
In January 1992, the Nguyen family arrived in Lawrence with about one hundred dollars after fleeing Vietnam, where Tram's father had spent eight years in a postwar re-education camp. They settled in public housing in the city, then later moved to Methuen. Lawrence is where Tram first learned what an American city is, and where her family joined an immigrant continuum that ran back through the Dominican families of the 1980s, the Italian and Polish weavers of 1912, and the Irish girls of the Pemberton Mill.
The moments
The sourced timeline.
- 01
Before 1630 · Colonial · pre-1763
Before Lawrence, the Pentucket on the Merrimack
Indigenous HistoryThe land that became Lawrence sat at the heart of Pennacook country. The Pawtucket band, called locally the Pentucket, held the stretch of the Merrimack River from the falls at present-day Lowell downstream to Haverhill. Their largest villages clustered at the fishing falls: Pentucket at Haverhill, Shawshin at Andover, Wamesit at Lowell.
The river was a corridor, not a border. In the spring shad and salmon ran up from the Atlantic in numbers that fed the entire valley. The Merrimack Valley before the epidemics of the 1610s likely supported between eight thousand and twenty-five thousand Pennacook people. Smallpox and other Atlantic diseases killed an estimated ninety percent of them before English settlement reached the inland river towns.
Figures · Pennacook (Pawtucket) people, Pentucket band
- 02
April 16, 1845 · Industrial · 1815–1880
A planned mill city, chartered on paper
InnovationLaborAbbott Lawrence, Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, and a small group of Boston Associates incorporated the Essex Company on April 16, 1845. Their charter was simple: develop the water power of the Merrimack at Bodwell's Falls and build a city of textile mills on the bottomland behind the dam.
Excavations for the Great Stone Dam began on August 1, 1845. When the dam was finished three years later it was nine hundred feet long, thirty-five feet high, and the largest dam in the world. Behind it the company laid out a grid of streets, dug a North and a South Canal, and sold mill sites to operators. The town was incorporated in 1847 and named, by vote, for the principal investor. Within a decade Lawrence was a working city of more than seventeen thousand people, almost all of them mill hands.
“The Great Stone Dam at the time of its completion was the largest dam in the world.”
Lawrence History Center Figures · Abbott Lawrence, Charles S. Storrow, Nathan Appleton
- 03
January 10, 1860 · Industrial · 1815–1880
Ninety seconds, and the Pemberton Mill came down
LaborImmigrationAt about 4:30 in the afternoon on January 10, 1860, the five-story Pemberton Mill collapsed onto its own workforce. Roughly seven hundred operatives were inside, most of them Irish and Scottish immigrant women and girls. Witnesses described a low rumble, then the building falling in on itself in less than two minutes.
Investigators later found that the owners had overloaded the upper floors with additional machinery and that the cast-iron support columns had been improperly manufactured. As rescuers worked through the rubble that night, an oil lamp tipped over, and the wreckage caught fire. Workers trapped alive in the debris burned to death as the city watched.
Roughly one hundred forty-five workers were killed and one hundred sixty-six were seriously injured. It is still recorded as one of the worst industrial accidents in nineteenth-century America, and it became an early case study in the case for industrial regulation.
Figures · Pemberton Mill workers, John Lowell, George Howe
- 04
June 1892 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Robert Frost, co-valedictorian, Lawrence High School
EducationRobert Frost spent his American boyhood in Lawrence. His mother taught school here. He published his first poem in the Lawrence High School Bulletin, served as class poet, and graduated in June 1892 as co-valedictorian alongside Elinor White, the classmate he would later marry.
After Dartmouth he came back to Lawrence and worked, among other jobs, as an editor at the Lawrence Sentinel and the Lawrence Daily American. The poems he wrote later about apple-picking and stone walls and mending fences were the work of a man who had first learned to write in a mill city, watching the looms run.
Figures · Robert Frost, Elinor White Frost
- 05
January 12 to March 14, 1912 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Bread and Roses: the strike that held the city for nine weeks
LaborImmigrationWomen's RightsOn January 1, 1912, a new Massachusetts law cut the work week for women and children from fifty-six hours to fifty-four. The mill owners answered by trimming the pay envelopes to match. On January 12, Polish women weavers at the Everett Mill opened their pay slips, found them short by about thirty-two cents, cut the belts driving the looms, and walked out shouting strike.
Within a week twenty-five thousand workers from more than fifty nationalities were out. The Industrial Workers of the World sent organizers Joe Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Big Bill Haywood. Strike committees met in twenty-five languages. On January 29, a striker named Anna LoPizzo was shot dead during a confrontation with police. Ettor and Giovannitti, three miles away at the time, were charged as accessories to her murder.
On February 10 the strikers began sending their hungry children out of the city to live with sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. About seven hundred children made the Children's Exodus. When Lawrence police clubbed mothers trying to put a second group on a train at the depot, the photographs ran in newspapers from coast to coast, and Congress opened hearings.
On March 14, 1912, the American Woolen Company conceded. The strikers won a fifteen percent raise, double time for overtime, and amnesty. Ettor and Giovannitti were acquitted that fall. Bread and Roses remains one of the defining strikes in American history, and the model for industrial unionism that would build the CIO a generation later.
“It is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.”
Figures · Anna LoPizzo, Joe Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William 'Big Bill' Haywood
- 06
April 1919 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Eight thousand women shut down the phone lines of New England
LaborWomen's RightsOn April 15, 1919, telephone operators across New England walked off the job. Eight thousand women, most of them young and Irish, brought phone service in five states to a near halt for five days. Lawrence operators were among the local exchanges that struck, part of an organizing network that ran the length of the Merrimack Valley.
Their leader was Julia O'Connor of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Women's Trade Union League. Five days in, New England Telephone agreed to recognize the union and grant the raise. It was one of the largest successful strikes ever led by women in the United States.
Figures · Julia O'Connor, Rose Finkelstein
- 07
1917 to 1945 · Modern · 1920–1965
Wool capital of the United States, through two world wars
LaborVeteransInnovationBy 1917 Lawrence led the country in worsted and woolen production. The American Woolen Company employed seventeen thousand operatives in the city, Pacific Mills another ten thousand, Arlington Mills eight thousand five hundred, Everett Mills five thousand five hundred. Roughly twenty percent of all American worsted goods came out of the Merrimack Valley, much of it through Lawrence looms.
During the First and Second World Wars, the city's mills wove the cloth for American uniforms. The Pacific Mills and the American Woolen Company ran government contracts around the clock. The end of the Korean War contract in the early 1950s, combined with the long postwar shift of textile capital to the non-union South, broke the city's economic base. Between 1951 and 1954 American Woolen alone announced the closing of fourteen factories across New England, including three of its largest in Lawrence.
- 08
1950s to 1960s · Modern · 1920–1965
The mills go south, and the city is left with the buildings
LaborThe decline was not gradual. Through the 1950s the great Lawrence mills closed in succession. American Woolen, Arlington, Pacific. The capital moved to North and South Carolina and, eventually, overseas. The buildings stayed.
Lawrence's population, which had peaked at ninety-four thousand in 1920 and was still over eighty thousand in 1950, fell to about sixty-four thousand by 1980. The city was left with miles of empty brick mill blocks along the canals, an aging tax base, and a wave of new arrivals from the Caribbean who were just beginning to take the apartments the millworkers had left behind.
- 09
1960s to 2000s · Contemporary · 1965–today
How Lawrence became the most Hispanic city in Massachusetts
ImmigrationCivic FirstsPuerto Rican families began arriving in Lawrence in the late 1960s, drawn by mill jobs that still existed and by cheap rents in the emptying tenements. Dominican families followed in larger numbers through the 1980s and 1990s, joined by smaller arrivals from Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. By the 2000 census, Lawrence was the most Hispanic city in New England, and by 2020 the population was eighty-two percent Hispanic or Latino, the largest share of any city in Massachusetts.
The transition was not gentle. In August 1984, tensions between white working-class residents and Hispanic newcomers erupted in two nights of street violence near the corner of Haverhill and Oxford streets, with buildings burned and more than three hundred people arrested. The city worked through it. In 2017, Lawrence elected Dan Rivera and then Kendrys Vasquez to lead the city; both reflected the demographic reality the census numbers had been reporting for two decades.
Figures · Puerto Rican community, Dominican community
- 10
September 13, 2018 · Contemporary · 1965–today
The Merrimack Valley gas explosions
LaborCivic FirstsOn the afternoon of September 13, 2018, natural gas at high pressure pushed into low-pressure distribution lines that ran under Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover. Pilot lights and gas appliances flared. Within hours more than eighty fires were burning across the three communities. One eighteen-year-old, Leonel Rondon of Lawrence, was killed when a chimney collapsed onto the car he was sitting in. Around thirty thousand residents were evacuated. One hundred thirty-one structures were damaged.
The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 2019 that the probable cause was the weak engineering management of Columbia Gas of Massachusetts: a work crew had abandoned an old cast-iron main without first moving the pressure-sensing line to the new polyethylene main, so the regulators read zero and kept pushing more gas into the system. Columbia Gas pleaded guilty in 2020 to violating federal pipeline safety law, paid a fifty-three million dollar fine, and was forced to sell its Massachusetts operations to Eversource.
Heat to Lawrence homes was not fully restored until December. The city's response, neighbors taking in neighbors, restaurants cooking for free, became the most-cited contemporary example of what civic life in the Immigrant City looks like under pressure.
Figures · Leonel Rondon
- 11
January 1992 · Contemporary · 1965–today
One Vietnamese family among many, arriving in the Immigrant City
ImmigrationIn January 1992, the Nguyen family arrived in Lawrence with one hundred dollars and the children's clothes they had packed in Saigon. The father had served alongside American forces in the South Vietnamese military and had spent eight years afterward in a re-education camp. The oldest of three children, Tram, was five.
They settled first in public housing in Lawrence, then moved to Methuen. The arc, war refugee in subsidized housing to lawyer to legislator, is the same arc the city had been writing for an Irish family in 1860, an Italian family in 1912, and a Dominican family in 1985. The story is Lawrence's; the names change.
Did you know
Surprising facts about Lawrence.
- Innovation
When it was finished in 1848, the Great Stone Dam at Lawrence was the largest dam in the world.
Nine hundred feet long, thirty-five feet high, built across the Merrimack to power the mills the Essex Company was about to build behind it.
Source · Lawrence History Center - Labor
The 1912 Bread and Roses Strike united twenty-five thousand textile workers from more than fifty nationalities, who held strike meetings in twenty-five languages.
Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Syrian, Greek, French Canadian, Irish, Belgian, German, Russian, and Portuguese workers, among others, ran the strike committees together.
Source · Digital Public Library of America - Education
Robert Frost graduated co-valedictorian of Lawrence High School in 1892, sharing the honor with his future wife Elinor White.
Frost spent his American boyhood in Lawrence and later worked as an editor at the Lawrence Sentinel before farming in Derry, New Hampshire.
Source · The Frost Place - Labor
On January 10, 1860, the Pemberton Mill collapsed in roughly ninety seconds. Around one hundred forty-five workers were killed, most of them Irish and Scottish immigrant women.
After the collapse a kerosene lamp ignited the rubble. Trapped survivors burned alive while the city watched. The disaster became an early national argument for industrial safety regulation.
Source · New England Historical Society - Women's Rights
During the Bread and Roses Strike, about seven hundred striker children were sent out of Lawrence to live with sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont.
When Lawrence police clubbed mothers trying to put the second train of children on board, photographs of the beatings forced Congress to open hearings.
Source · Bread and Roses Heritage Committee - Immigration
As of the 2020 census, Lawrence is the most Hispanic city in Massachusetts: eighty-two percent of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Dominicans are the largest single ancestry group, followed by Puerto Ricans. The city's population peaked at ninety-four thousand in 1920 and stood at eighty-nine thousand in 2020.
Source · U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts - Innovation
By 1917, Lawrence led the United States in worsted and woolen production. The American Woolen Company alone employed seventeen thousand operatives in the city.
Source · Encyclopedia Americana (1920) - Civic Firsts
The 2018 Merrimack Valley gas explosions ignited more than eighty fires across Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover in a single afternoon, evacuating roughly thirty thousand residents.
The NTSB blamed weak engineering management at Columbia Gas. The company pleaded guilty in 2020 and paid a fifty-three million dollar fine.
Source · National Transportation Safety Board
The people
Figures from Lawrence.
Abbott Lawrence
Industrial · 1815–1880
Boston textile capitalist, co-founder of the Essex Company (1845), principal investor in the planned mill city that took his name. Later U.S. Minister to the Court of St. James.
Anna LoPizzo
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Italian immigrant textile worker shot dead on January 29, 1912, during the Bread and Roses Strike. The Italian-American community of Lawrence holds her memory each January.
Robert Frost
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Lawrence High School class of 1892, co-valedictorian, first poems published in the Lawrence High School Bulletin and the Lawrence Sentinel. Four-time Pulitzer winner.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
IWW organizer, twenty-one years old when she arrived in Lawrence to help run the Bread and Roses Strike. Later a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Big Bill Haywood
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Founding leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. Led strike strategy in Lawrence in 1912. The Bread and Roses victory was the high-water mark of IWW industrial unionism in the East.
Arturo Giovannitti
Progressive Era · 1880–1920
Italian-American poet and IWW organizer. Jailed for nearly a year on a framed murder charge during the strike. Acquitted in November 1912. His prison verse circulated nationally.