It was a very efficient, highly profitable mill that, with the aid of the Tariff of 1816, competed effectively with British textiles at a time when many smaller operations were being forced out of business.

Since 1793, when Samuel Slater established the first water-powered successful textile spinning mill in America at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, water power had been operating machinery to process cotton fiber into yarn, which would then be outsourced to small weaving shops and private homes where it would be woven into cloth on hand-operated looms.

While on a visit to Lancashire, England, in 1810,[5] Francis Cabot Lowell studied the workings of the successful British textile industry.

Upon his return trip to Boston in 1812, he committed the plans to memory, disguising himself as a country farmer, since the British banned export of the new technology at the time.

The Boston Associates attempted to create a well-controlled system of labor which varied from the harsh conditions observed while in Lancashire.

The mill owners recruited young Yankee farm girls from the surrounding area to come work the machines at Waltham.

The mill girls, as they came to be known, lived in boarding houses provided by the company and were supervised by older women, and were subject to strict codes of conduct.

[8] By the early 1820s, the water power of the Charles River at Waltham was just about maximized, and the investors sought a new location to build even more mills.

As the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, in 1822 they copied the Waltham System at the new city of Lowell, Massachusetts, on a much larger scale.

The same group of investors would later establish Lawrence, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; and several other new industrial centers throughout New England during the first half of the 19th century.