Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
Did you know that Jingle Bells was composed by James Lord Pierpoint in Medford, Massachusetts in 1850? It’s claimed that the town’s 19th century sleigh races inspired the song, and that it was originally written as a Thanksgiving, not Christmas song. Why “jingle bells”? Music historian James Fuld informs that the horse-drawn sleighs of the […]
Read MoreHuntington Hall/Merrimack Street Depot By 1904, the building that housed both Huntington Hall and the Merrimack Street Depot had served as the city’s main public gathering place for generations. The City of Lowell and the Boston & Lowell Railroad entered into a joint agreement to build the hall in 1853, providing the railroad with the Merrimack […]
Read MoreSo, say you’ve inherited a large stack of family photographs showing ancestors who are far up your family tree – such as great-grandparents, or their siblings, cousins, or close family friends. As you stare into the moment in time captured in that cabinet card or tin type photograph, do you ever wonder what their voices […]
Read MoreNote to readers: The St. Patrick’s Church fire of 1904 occurred just one day before the Fellows Block fire covered in last week’s post. This post marks the third installment of the Grand Fires of 1904 series. On Monday, January 11, 1904, Sister Josephine, a teacher at Notre Dame Academy in Lowell, Massachusetts, awoke, rose from […]
Read MoreIn the 80 years leading up to 1904, Lowell, Massachusetts had grown from a sparsely populated corner of East Chelmsford into a bustling manufacturing city of 95,000 residents. Like any Edwardian-era city, Lowell faced its share of fire risks, especially in its downtown area. Before January was even half over in 1904, Lowell had suffered […]
Read MoreIf you were to visit Lowell, Massachusetts before . . . say, 1890, you would not have met many men walking about the city named João or Manuel. The Portuguese began arriving en masse in New England in the late 19th century and had established, by the first decades of the 20th century, sizable communities in […]
Read MoreFire was a danger never far from the minds of our ancestors at the turn of the last century. In 1904, Lowell, Massachusetts, then a manufacturing city of 95,000 residents and the 39th largest city in the United States¹, suffered a record-setting year in terms of fires, alarms, and losses suffered. Before the year would […]
Read MoreIt turns out that wild turkeys are incredibly difficult to move across long distances. In the days before refrigerated travel, a national roadway system, and even railroads, driving turkeys across long stretches of land was the province of men called turkey drovers. From 1790 to about 1830, turkey drovers walked turkeys to market, literally, at a […]
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‘Herring choker.’ Today, it’s a somewhat pejorative term used in some circles to refer to Scandinavians or possibly folks from the Canadian province of New Brunswick. In our family (which has neither of those connections), it’s remembered as the term my great-grandmother used when referring to my grandfather’s (her son-in-law’s) Owen family. By the time […]
Read MoreWere your ancestors among the crowds gathered to meet a young Charles Dickens when he visited Lowell, Massachusetts in early February 1842? Dickens, a young writer of rising fame at the time of his visit, had yet to write A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities. His fame had largely been won […]
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Forgotten New England 