Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
In the days before refrigeration, ice was a valuable winter cash crop for enterprising businessmen. Ice was a year-round staple in most households, and many families would give up food before they would give up ice. As a region, New England was well-known for its quality ice. The region’s severe cold coupled with its deep ponds produced […]
Read MoreOn a summer morning in July 1890, the cyclone hit Lawrence, Massachusetts suddenly and without warning. What we would today call a tornado or microburst began as soft showers advancing across the city as people made their way to work on Saturday, July 26, 1890. As nine o’clock approached, the clouds thickened and darkened the sky. The […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Read MoreIf you’ve spent any time researching ancestors, or the history of your town, or even history in general, you’ve likely come across old group photographs. A workplace outing from long ago, an annual gathering of some institution or society, or maybe a family gathering. If you’ve stared into the faces of those who gathered for […]
Read MoreAs news of World War I and Spanish flu filled the local papers, the first headlines related to Billerica’s car shop murder almost could have gone unnoticed. In fact, the murder itself went unnoticed for several days. The last anyone had seen of Fred Soulia, an employee at Billerica’s Boston & Maine car shops (today’s […]
Read MoreA steady stream of ten boys, each jumping from the classroom windows of the Rainsford Island House of Reformation, sprinted for the shore under the cover of the night fog on August 19, 1899. They found their way through the brush by the light of the fire that raged through their prison behind them. As […]
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Forgotten New England 