Lowell, Massachusetts (Part 18)

Part 18 - Canal Ride - June 2008

The National Park offers boat tours of the canal system. I had done one when I was five and another last year, but this year they offer a few special tours where you lock all the way out on the Pawtucket Canal to the Merrimack River, and then come back all the way down to Lower Locks. So...we went on that. Unfortunately, the little Kodak we had been using broke shortly before, so we had a new, even smaller pocket-sized Sony and a small FujiFilm. The Sony doesn't have the best optics for scenery, and the FujiFilm ... the colors were so bad I returned it the next day for a big Canon. And, the weather was extremely overcast. So - I apologize for the quality in advance. Not as if any of our pictures were ever of high quality anyhow ;-)

The Park runs a few trolleys - this one is actually from New Orleans, and has been fixed up for the park. They took us from the Visitor's Center on Market Street a whole block and a half down to the Swamp Locks.

Said Swamp Locks and the boats we used. They just fixed the lock chambers here for this season. The locks allow you to go down to the Lower Pawtucket Canal (the famous Industrial Canyon). Behind the locks is a major branch in the canal system: in addition to the Lower Pawtucket, the Western, Hamilton, and Merrimack Canals, branch off of the Upper Pawtucket at this point (map).

The trip began by travelling up the Pawtucket Canal, towards the Francis Gate. One of the first things you hit is this building, which today is best known for being home to Western Avenue Studios. Original Name in the nineteen teens: Massachusetts Mohair and Plush Company. If you don't know what Mohair is, don't feel bad...I had to Google it. Note how it hugs the curved canal wall. I guess Joan Fabrics was making car upholstery here until not too long ago.

My camera basically decided this picture should be black and white so I went with it :-). This building is a cogeneration plant, which in another piece of industrial knowledge I gained, is a plant that generates both useful heat and electricity. The chimney for this plant and the tower of Western Avenue are visible on the right-hand side of the trolley picture a few up.

This bridge with a freight train idling on it is visible from Broadway Street, right by the Francis Gate. This is the B&M mainline that goes from Lowell, into North Chelmsford, then Tyngsboro, then Nashua.

Coming up to the Guard Locks, and the Francis Gate beyond that. I talked about that plenty on the page about the 2006 Flood. Note the locktenders watching us approach.

A toll schedule for common cargo on the canal. I've never seen so many ditto marks in my life. The Pawtucket Canal, before it worked as a feeder for the city's power canals, was a transportation canal going back to the 1790s, designed to get goods and people around the Pawtucket Falls. We are sitting in a lock chamber right now, with the gates in front of us and behind us closed, and the wickets, which are little gates under the water line in the main gates, open in the front gate. This raises the water level in the chamber to the level of the Merrimack.

The high water marks for the 1852 and 1936 floods on the side of the Francis Gatehouse. You can see part of the huge wooden gate on the lefthand side of the picture.

Out on the river. This is the Pawtucket Gatehouse, which controlls the water entering into the Northern Canal. I talked about this more when I visited the Northern Canal. This was a very strange place to be, since we were going right up to the flashboards on top of the dam. Note how the water seems to go to the bridge, but disappears a little early in a yellow line. That's because we're on top of a dam with nothing but iron rods and plywood holding the water we are floating in from bursting over the top and crashing us down on the rocks.

The ducks love it out here. Anything and everything that floats backs up behind the dam and in the canals.

Locking down into the Pawtucket Canal again. You can tell we're locking down because the gates are always built to angle inwards to where the higher water is. So, if they are angled toward you as you go forward, you'll go down when they open the wickets. The chains running to the top of the gate control the wickets below.

Back to Swamp Locks, we are looking backwards while locking down in the chamber. You can see, through the water rushing through the cracks from the higher water we just left behind us, that these gates point back up the canal. Note the manual cranks for the wickets on top of the gates. Our boat is named after early textile machinery engineer Paul Moody. Moody Street in both Lowell and, more notably, Lowell's prototype, Waltham, are named after Paul.

The walls of the old Appleton Mill as we enter the "Industrial Canyon" of the Lower Pawtucket Canal. Note you can see Middlesex Community College in the distance, on the other side of Central Street and near the Lower Locks that empty the Lower Pawtucket Canal into the Concord, then the Merrimack, rivers.

A wasteway canal on the other side of the boat runs alongside Canal Place III. Yes, those are life preservers in the boat, but I don't care how clean they say these canals are today - drowning would not be my concern if I fell in.

As we approach the Lower Locks, we come to the branch with the Eastern Canal that feeds the Massachusetts Mills, and the Boott Mills as well.

Middlesex Community College and the Lower Locks Gatehouse - end of our trip.

Suffolk Mill Turbine Exhibit

Fully operational this year, this exhibit in the Wannalancit Mill shows how a turbine works to power a loom.

This is the cover of the turbine. It's a large gear connected to another one in the casing, which is connected to a drive shaft. The large, rusty tube in the front is feeding us from the Northern Canal. These turbines are actually very efficient at converting the energy from the falling water into mechanical energy. And, unlike old-fashioned waterwheels, they don't lose power if the water backs up below them, placing them under water. I say old-fashioned waterwheels, but the Francis Turbine dates to the 1840s...

The turbine spins, connected to this massive flywheel in the next room.

The flywheel is connected to a smaller wheel by a large belt. This smaller wheel connects by a rod to an even smaller wheel, and then that would've connected to the ceiling wheel by another large belt. The ceiling wheel is on a driveshaft, which would have a series of wheels and belts running off of it to the machinery on the floor. Note the metal cages to catch the belts (3 feet wide or so in the case of the main flywheel...) in case of breakage. Our guide mentioned that in the days before OSHA, these safety devices were not in place. Another common issue is the shuttle that carries the cross-threads across the loom can come loose. And if you've ever seen one of these old looms work, they move at a pretty good pace. I guess they go fast enough that they can go into a wall should they break out.

This is the turbine governor. Should the turbine flow too fast, this creates a mechanical feedback loop that covers part of the turbine's intake valves, slowing it down. Should the turbine run too slow, the cover lifts, and more water can enter the turbine. You can see some beltings, including one from the governor to the turbine housing behind it, and a close look will show the spinning metal balls on top of the governor that move inwards or outwards from a vertical shaft. This motion is how the governor senses the speed of the turbine.