The Proprietors of Locks and Canals constructed the historic home at 243 Worthen Street in c. 1825.
Incorporating both Federal and Greek Revival characteristics, the home’s main features include:
From c. 1825 to 1866, the WHMA was home to many of the leaders of Lowell’s and America’s Industrial Revolution. James McNeill Whistler was born in the house in 1834 and his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, is the subject of one of America’s most famous paintings, “Whistler’s Mother” (Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1). These residents include:
(May 23, 1779 – July 5, 1831)
Paul Moody was a textile machinery inventor born in Byfield, Massachusetts. Working with Francis Cabot Lowell, he assisted in creating the first functional power loom in the United States. This loom was adapted from British technology and could turn cotton threads into finished fabrics at fast speeds. He also pioneered many additions to the machines, including the “dead spindle,” “filling frame,” and the “double speeder.”1 In 1828, Moody created a system that used leather belts and a pulley system to transfer power from a main shaft down to hundreds of connected machines. This innovation allowed for a smoother and more efficient transfer of power with fewer breakdowns.2
While in the city of Lowell, Moody opened the Lowell Machine Works (later Lowell Machine Shop) to supply the city’s mills with these revolutionary machines. He served as the chief engineer for the Proprietors of Locks and Canals, during which time he was the first resident of what is now the Whistler House Museum of Art in c. 1825, living there until his death in 1831. His widow, Susan Moody, lived for two more years in the house with their children, before moving to Gorham Street. His ingenious inventions pushed the United States into becoming a major leader in the textile industry and he is forever honored by the City of Lowell, who named Moody Street after him.
(May 19, 1800 – April 7, 1849)
Major George Washington Whistler was a prominent engineer who graduated from the prestigious U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the Corps of Artillery as a topography engineer in New York and later joined the Board of Civil Engineers to work on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
In 1834, Major Whistler moved to Lowell to work for the Proprietors of Locks and Canals. Whistler was the Superintendent of the Lowell Machine Shop and oversaw the creation of the shop’s first locomotive in 1835. He disassembled an English engine and used the parts to create a pattern for one of New England’s first steam engine.3 After his time in Lowell, Whistler was the Chief Engineer of the Boston & Albany Railroad between 1840 and 1842, laying a route through the rough terrain of Western Massachusetts.
In 1842, Major Whistler was invited by Czar Nicholas I of Russia to construct a railroad connecting St. Petersburg and Moscow.4 Unfortunately, Whistler died in 1849 of cholera, two years before the completion of the rail line. However, the engineers of the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway honored Major Whistler by commissioning an engraved silver samovar (Russian urn to boil and heat water for tea) as a gift to the Whistler family. The samovar is now part of the WHMA collection.
(September 27, 1804 – January 31, 1881)
Anna Matilda McNeill was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1831, she married George Washington Whistler, who was a friend of her brother. The couple had four children together, although only two survived until adulthood. She traveled to Russia with her husband in 1842 and returned to the United States after his death. Living as a widow and dressing entirely in black, she first stayed in Stonington, Connecticut before moving south to Virginia following the start of the Civil War to care for her son, William.
In 1863, Anna Whistler moved to London to live with her eldest son, James McNeill Whistler. In 1871, James painted the famous portrait Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.5
(July 11, 1834 – July 17, 1903)
James McNeill Whistler was born on the second floor of the Whistler House in Lowell on July 11, 1834. In 1842, the family moved to Russia where James studied drawing at the Imperial Academy of Arts. While he was staying in England due to health concerns, his father died of cholera. As a result, the family returned to America and lived in Connecticut. Here, James enrolled in the Military Academy at West Point, but was later dismissed and began pursuing art professionally.
The artist spent most of his time studying art in Paris and London. During this time, he replaced his original middle name of Abbott with his mother’s maiden name McNeill, creating his iconic butterfly monogram (JMW).6
In 1877, Whistler exhibited Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. The painting was denounced by art critic and writer John Ruskin who accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”7 A trial for libel followed in which Whistler won, claiming that the painting was meant to evoke an experience and feeling rather than a time and place. The judge awarded Whistler a single farthing (quarter of a penny), which rendered the artist bankrupt. He would continue to discuss his artistic theory in his Ten O’Clock Lecture in 1885 and The Gentle Art of Making Enemies in 1890.
From his theories, the beginning of the modern art movement would unfold. Artists began focusing on creating art for its beauty in the Aestheticism movement as well as incredible compositions of color in the Tonalism movement. Both of which can be wonderfully attributed to Whistler’s advocacy for “art for art’s sake.”
(August 9, 1793 – April 27, 1872)
George Brownell was the successor to Paul Moody as the Superintendent of the Lowell Machine Shop (formerly the Lowell Machine Works). In 1837, he moved to Worthen Street after the Whistlers left. Due to Major Whistler and Brownell’s contributions, the expansion of the railroad was a major boon to the city. As a result, the Lowell Machine Shop built locomotives in addition to supplying power looms to the mills.
While he retired from the role in 1846, he continued to involve himself in the growth of Lowell as an industrial city. On February 13, 1849, Brownell left Lowell to travel to the United Kingdom to inspect English railways and “study the industrial and mechanical conditions and methods.”8 As a successful predecessor of industrialization, many visitors would come to Great Britain to study the English model. Brownell wrote detailed descriptions of machinery and locomotives in his journal which he brought back and published in the United States. These details provide magnificent insight into the innovations being made in England.
(February 12, 1817 – November 30, 1904)
Sarah Wilbur (Brownell) Francis was a beloved philanthropist and pillar of her community. Daughter of George Brownell and Quakeress Lydia Sweet, Francis was born in Thompson, Connecticut to a large family. Due to her father’s machinist job, Francis moved to Waltham before settling in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1824. Sarah witnessed the growth of the city from its beginning as East Chelmsford into the City of Lowell. During her childhood, she attended St. Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, where she commuted by boat along the Middlesex Canal. Her attendance ceased in 1834 due to the convent burning down during a series of anti-Catholic riots.9
On July 12th, 1837, Sarah W. Francis married James Bicheno Francis. At first, the newlywed couple boarded at her childhood home on Dutton Street, but in 1846 Francis was appointed the engineer for the Proprietors of Locks and Canals and moved to the Whistler House. During Francis’s time at the house, she frequented the garden and worked to cultivate it into a public space full of flowers and fruit trees.10 Together, the two had eight children. Mainly, Francis loved to entertain. She hosted a myriad of events, such as musicals and dinner parties. Francis’s hospitality cemented her as a generous and reliable community member, and she was adored among the residents of early Lowell.
(May 18, 1815 – September 18, 1892)
British-born James B. Francis was the son-in-law of George Brownell and well-known for his innovations in hydraulic engineering. Francis left England for the United States in 1833 where he assisted Major George Washington Whistler in constructing the Stonington Railway in Connecticut.11 The two men moved to Lowell in 1834 where Francis remained an assistant to Whistler, who was the chief engineer of the Proprietors of Locks and Canals at that time.
When he left Lowell for Russia in 1842, Whistler appointed the young Francis as his successor. James B. Francis began innovating ways of managing Lowell’s waterways to increase water flow while also revolutionizing the turbines used to generate power to the mills. Adapting a design by Uriah Boyden, Francis was able to redesign the turbine to achieve “an astounding 88 percent efficiency rate” compared to the 65 percent rate of the previous waterwheels.12 Further experimentation would create the “mixed-flow reaction turbine,” which would become the standard in America and be named the “Francis turbine.” Twenty-two of these turbines are still in the Hoover Dam! Francis published his work on hydraulic engineering in The Lowell Hydraulic Experiments in 1855.
(May 18, 1815 – September 18, 1892)
After James Francis left the Whistler House, the historic home alternated between several private owners who operated the building as a boarding house, with the Lynch Family serving as the owners for nearly twenty years. From the 1890s until 1907, the Whistler House was the home of James and Bridget Lynch with their five children. James (1861-1905) was born on a farm in Tewksbury, MA to Irish parents. Bridget (1859-1910) immigrated from Ireland in 1881 before marrying James in 1888.
When the Lynch Family bought the property in the 1890s, the city did not yet recognize the building as a historic location. The family converted the site into a proper boarding house, removing a dividing wall to create a large dining room (now the Museum’s Main Gallery) and built a stable in the backyard for cart-pulling horses.
Together, James and Bridget had five children:
James Lynch passed away on August 22, 1905, leaving Bridget the sole proprietor of the boarding house. In 1907, she sold the house to the Lowell Art Association, which opened its doors to the public in 1908. Both James and Bridget, as well as their sons Cornelius and Patrick, are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Lowell.13
1Henry Adolphus Miles, Lowell, as It Was, and as It Is (Powers and Bagley and N.L. Dayton, 1845), pp. 225-227, http://archive.org/details/lowellasitwasan00milegoog.
2“Suffolk Mills Turbine Exhibit,” National Park Service, October 7, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/historyculture/suffolk-mills-turbine-exhibit.htm.
3National Park Service, “Lowell Machine Shop,” National Park Service, February 26, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/photosmultimedia/machine_shop.htm.
4“George Washington Whistler,” American Society of Civil Engineers, https://www.asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/notable-civil-engineers/george-washington-whistler.
5“About Whistler’s Mother,” https://www.clarkart.edu/microsites/whistlers-mother/about/exhibition-(3).
6“James McNeill Whistler – Biography,” National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1974.html#biography.
7John Rushkin, “Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, vol. 4, letter LXXIX” in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10 (Philadelphia: Reuwee, Wattley & Walsh, 1891), p. 72., https://archive.org/details/forsclavigera04ruskiala/page/72/mode/1up.
8George Brownell, “The Journal of George Brownell on a Voyage to England in 1839,” in Contributions of the Lowell Historical Society, vol. 2 (Lowell, Mass.: Butterfield Printing Company, 1926), pp. 325, http://archive.org/details/contributionsofl03lowe.
9Rachel Bohlmann and Jean McManus, cur. “The Burning of the ursuline Convent” in Preserving the Steadfastness of Your Youth (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries, 2017), https://digital-exhibits.library.nd.edu/04f477d5b4/preserving-the-steadfastness-of-your-faith.
10Mabel Hill, “Mrs. Sarah W. Francis,” in Contributions of the Lowell Historical Society, vol. 1 no. 1 (Lowell, Mass.: Butterfield Printing Company, 1907), pp. 87, https://archive.org/details/contributionsofl00lowe.
11“James Bicheno Francis,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Bicheno-Francis.
12“Lowell National Historical Park and National Park Service, “James B. Francis,” Educational, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/historyculture/james-b-francis.htm.
13Information provided by the Lynch Family to the Whistler House Museum of Art, December 2015.
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