How We Know What We Know

Eliza Paige was not a real person. Her character was created for this website by historians at the Center for Lowell History and the Tsongas Industrial History Center in Lowell. All of the choices she faces and all of the things that happen to her are based on research into the lives of real people. A young woman moving from a New Hampshire farm to work in a Massachusetts textile factory in the 1830s would, like Eliza Paige, have had to decide where to live, what to do with the money she earned, how to spend her free time, and whether to protest working conditions. She would have labored in a mill and lived in a boardinghouse like the ones you can see if you visit Lowell National Historical Park, where the Quick Time Video on the website was shot.