Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
In 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 […]
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 […]
Read MoreDo you commute to work using public transportation? There’s a certain etiquette, a set of norms, that is easily observable when you are on the bus, the train, the subway, or even a plane. There’s a prevailing thought out there that civility is a “thing of the past”. But, was it? Did our ancestors live […]
Read MoreIf you were to walk . . . through Boston’s Scollay Square and down Tremont Street, into what those alive in 1895 called “the congested district”, you would feel the crush of people and electric car traffic on what, even then, was considered a narrow road. On this midsummer workday, as you walk southwest through the […]
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Forgotten New England 