Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"During the immediate postwar years of 1816 to 1820, cotton constituted 39 percent of U.S. exports; Twenty years later the proportion had increased to 59 percent . . . 'Whoever says industrial revolution says cotton,' observed the great economic historian Eric Hobsbawm. . . . Lowell had recently returned from one of the most successful of all enterprises of industrial espionage, conceived even before the war began. . . . By 1814, Lowell and his brilliant mechanic, Paul Moody, could proudly demonstrate to the company directors an operational water-powered loom in Waltham, Massachusetts. . . . Their three mills at Waltham having proved successful, the shareholders embarked in 1821 on a still more ambitious project, a custom-built mill town. Jackson and Appleton named it for Lowell, who had died in 1817. . . . For a labor supply, the owners turned to the young women of rural New England. . . . The 'mill girls,' as they called themselves, wrote and published a magazine, the Lowell Offering. . . . Lowell, Massachusetts, boasted the largest concentration of industry in the United States before the Civil War. . . . In 1832, textile companies comprised 88 of the 106 largest corporations in the United States."