The thunderous slamming of shuttles across Lowell mill power looms was relentless and unremittingly repetitive. The floors shook from the ceaseless hammering from this army of fabric-producing machinery. To ten-year old Sally Palmer trailing after her father as he inspected the machines, the noise “was loud -- terrible loud;” and she had to put her hands over her ears when standing beside a running loom. Her father would have to speak loudly right into her ear, or they’d go into an office and shut the door, if he had to tell her something. Sally was not a mill girl working at the looms, but rather a child enjoying a Saturday or a school vacation day with her father in the 1930s. She brought along a book to read, in case he had to settle her in a corner someplace while he talked with a foreman. In addition to relishing her time with her dad, Sally loved these mill tours because she picked up scraps of fabric to make doll clothes. “The mill workers used to give me samples,” she recalled. “The people standing beside each loom had to watch and fix a machine if a string broke.” When they stopped a machine -- “getting ready for another job, a different color or different weave -- they’d have the ends of fabric.” They also had to cut off a section, if a machine jammed, and those oily or torn pieces were tossed onto a pile on the floor at the end of the loom. “There were always scraps.” But the machines ran steadily and not much was wasted. For a girl who cherished fabrics, Sally Palmer, born in Lowell, was in the right place. The American Industrial Revolution was centered here in the mills along the Merrimack River, which dropped 32 feet at the Pawtucket Falls. First hydraulic power from the waterfall set the mill gears in motion to make cotton fabric; then after the Civil War, coal-fueled steam power sustained the factories; and after 1915 electricity channeled the energy for textile production. It has been theorized that the cotton cloth produced in Lowell mills in 1848 amounted to 50,000 miles, or enough fabric to twice circle the earth. Through the years, Lowell had factories for producing an array of materials: cotton shirting, toweling, worsted wools, knit stockings, silk and rayon, floor carpets, plush upholstery, cotton underwear, uniforms, parachutes, flags, blankets, tents, and many specialty products such as shoelaces, threads, and ribbons. Born on August 3, 1922, Sally witnessed the last days of textile glory for the City of Spindles. The industry experienced a regional depression and combated growing competition from the South and from Asia. Historian Mary Blewett writes that “between 1926 and 1936, twenty thousand looms fell silent as five of the original textile companies shut down or moved South.” Working in Lowell in the 1930s, Carl Fenton Palmer was part of a team of engineers overseeing and upgrading power production. “Dad worked for Locks and Canals [Corporation] who owned the power. The mills used the power but didn’t have their own power plants,” explained Sally. As he made his rounds, he sometimes had a child in tow, since his wife Minnie sent one of their five children for a Saturday with Dad. Sally, more than her older sister Anne, liked these strolls through the textile factories. The workers “didn’t speak English – probably Polish or Greek,” she now surmises – but knew she was Carl Palmer’s daughter and smiled as they gave the little girl a piece of fabric. She recalls the deafening din of the looms in the Wannalancit and Boott mills, where corduroy, velveteen, and toweling were produced. She wasn’t much interested in the toweling made at the Boott Mill, preferring the flowered fabric from other places. She “had a passion for doll clothes” and snatched up the material she liked from piles on the floor. “Even if it had an oil spill on a portion of it,” she’d carry it home and sew wardrobes for her twelve-inch Patsy doll and others. She made a few doll quilts as well. “To be honest, I picked up scraps wherever I went,” she said. She collected them from Lowell’s Ideal Dress Company on Bridge Street and the Hockmeyer Corduroy Factory run by a family friend, Mr. Pontefract. She made doll clothes from the socks she picked up in another mill. She found fabric in the dump near her great-grandparent’s farm in Maine. “Germs didn’t bother me a particle,” she says. Her mother had medical training and “got upset by the dump-picking.” But Sally threw the free fabric in the laundry basket for Votta Botta, their housekeeper, to wash in the family’s Easy™ washing machine. After the rags were clean, Sally happily used the fabric. Half joking, she confides that later in life, she “had to take up quilting because she had to use up her [stash of] scraps and make quilts.” Actually, those mill tours influenced Sally more than by merely increasing her dolls’ accessories. What she saw inspired her to become a life-long promoter of the history of Lowell and the textile industry there. Staging Lowell’s first quilt show in 1978, she persuaded families she knew to loan antique quilts made with Lowell fabrics and she made others herself with vintage material. For a show in 1982 she offered Old Lowell, a “sampler quilt” (indicates a variety of patterns, not just one repeated design) she made with many fabrics from Lowell mills and two 1876 centennial prints. The quilt featured over thirty patterns, had borders of flying geese triangles, four-square borders on point, and a row of nine-patch blocks on point. Most of the fabrics were browns, blues, or madder reds giving the quilt a truly antique look. In 1987 for a special quilt exhibit of mill-related works titled “Featuring Lowell,” Sally created her Mile of Mills panel, a wall hanging made entirely from fabric produced in Lowell at the Merrimack, Newmarket, Boott, Hamilton, Wannalancit, and Hockmeyer mills and sewn with locally produced thread from the John C. Meyer Co.
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