Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
Lowell’s Irish and French Canadian populations long had an uneasy relationship. I grew up hearing about it, a century after the French Canadians first starting appearing in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1870s. By the time the French Canadians began arriving in Lowell, the Irish Catholics – who had started appearing a generation earlier – had […]
Read MoreThe Valentine’s Day Storm of 1940 crossed Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts within just a few days in February 1940. Locals said it was the biggest storm to hit the region since the New England Hurricane of 1938, some 15 months before. The first flurries started on the morning of Valentine’s Day, before progressing into […]
Read MoreLamplighters turned night into day. A staple of the urban Victorian streetscape, the nostalgic image persists of a lone man, walking a darkening city street as dusk descended behind him, extending his staff to ignite each dark, cold lamp stem to life with a small flame. He would light the way along the lonely city […]
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Is mac and cheese a Thanksgiving dish? Was Thanksgiving dinner different during Victorian times?
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A roll of quarters went a long way at Fun Time Amusements at the Billerica Mall.Despite the mall’s recent renaissance, it’s hard to remember the Billerica Mall of the 1980s and 90s today.
Read MoreThe first alarm sounded just after midnight on April 27, 1924. Lowell’s firemen arrived soon after to find tendrils of smoke wafting from the Associate Building’s fourth floor windows. Inside, the Portuguese Club was ablaze. By the time firemen gained access to the downtown Lowell landmark, they found the fire well underway inside and quickly […]
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My two-year-old son loves trains. One of his first words was “train”. And, he likes to announce the arrival and departure of trains, with the word “train”, repeatedly, while pointing. The fascination people have with trains can be traced back much further than today’s living generations. In fact, before planes and automobiles, trains, or iron […]
Read MoreShorthand experienced its heyday in the years immediately following the Civil War. As the end of the 19th century approached, many reporters began to swear off its usefulness, saying that shorthand’s time had passed, and that it was no longer worth the significant effort required to learn it. By the early 1890’s, the century’s practice […]
Read More“Are you a good sleuth?” The headline teased, from the Lowell Sun’s front page. One hundred years ago, on Saturday, September 21, 1912, the newspaper invited all would-be sleuths to Lowell’s Merrimack Square (today’s Kearney Square) that night, at 8 PM, ‘sharp’. One lucky sleuth, they claimed, would win $100 ($2300 in today’s dollars) if […]
Read MoreThings have to get fairly dire before your entire student body, well, 97% of your student body, boycotts your school due to “dangerous conditions”. But, that’s precisely what happened at Lowell’s Riverside School on a Monday morning in late March, 1971. Of the school’s 205 students in Grades K through 5, just six showed up […]
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Forgotten New England 