Cotton mill

A factory that processes raw cotton into yarn and often weaves the yarn into cloth. Mechanized cotton mills became central to industrial textile production.

Cotton gin: A machine that separates cotton fibers from seeds and other debris. Ginning prepares harvested cotton for the spinning machinery inside a mill.
Industrial Revolution: A period of major technological and economic transformation beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century. Cotton mills helped drive the Industrial Revolution's shift to mechanized production.
Francis Cabot Lowell: An American merchant who helped establish integrated textile manufacturing in Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century. Lowell's mills combined spinning and weaving under one company and workplace.
Child labour: The employment of children in work that deprives them of childhood or harms their development. Cotton mills employed children in dangerous tasks and helped spur factory regulation.
Putting-out system: A production arrangement in which merchants supplied materials to dispersed households that worked for pay. It relied on household labor rather than concentrating workers and machines in mills.
Carding: A textile process that disentangles, cleans, and aligns fibers into a loose web or sliver. Carding organizes cotton fibers before they are drawn and spun.
Water frame: A water-powered spinning frame patented by Richard Arkwright in 1769. It enabled large-scale spinning in mills built beside reliable water supplies.
Lowell mill girls: Young women employed in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the nineteenth century. Their labor and activism illuminate the workforce behind early American cotton mills.
Urbanization: The growth of the share of a population living in towns and cities. Mill employment drew people into rapidly expanding industrial towns.
Cottage industry: Small-scale production carried out in homes or workshops, often by family members. Cotton mills displaced or reorganized textile work once done in households.

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