Here’s the eighth installment of my Twitter “tweets” of Charles Cowley’s “Illustrated History of Lowell.” We’ve almost reached the city’s incorporation in 1826 (as a town). Much happened here before Lowell even existed.

In 1819 Moses Hale + Oliver Whipple built a (gun) powder mill on Concord River in Lowell

In 1818 Thomas Hurd purchased the East Chelmsford cotton mill of Whiting + Fletcher + converted it into a woolen mill

In 1818, Winthrop Howe started a flannel mill at Wamesit Falls in Belvidere

The bridge across the Concord River at East Merrimack St was constructed in 1819

Maj General Joseph Varnum of Dracut died in 1821 at age 70 – “the most distinguished man in the Merrimack Valley”

While visiting England in 1810 Francis Cabot Lowell studied manufacturing hoping to introduce a similar system in America

In 1813 Francis Cabot Lowell returned to Boston convinced that cotton manufacturing in America could compete with England