the South were now piling up mountains of raw cotton, and
Slater's machines in New England were making this cotton into
yarn, it was inevitable that the next step should be the power
loom, to convert the yarn into cloth. So Francis Cabot Lowell,
scion of the New England family of that name, an importing
merchant of Boston, conceived the idea of establishing weaving
mills in Massachusetts. On a visit to Great Britain in 1811,
Lowell met at Edinburgh Nathan Appleton, a fellow merchant of
Boston, to whom he disclosed his plans and announced his
intention of going to Manchester to gain all possible information
concerning the new industry. Two years afterwards, according to
Appleton's account, Lowell and his brother-in-law, Patrick T.
Jackson, conferred with Appleton at the Stock Exchange in Boston.
They had decided, they said, to set up a cotton factory at
Waltham and invited Appleton to join them in the adventure, to
which he readily consented. Lowell had not been able to obtain
either drawings or model in Great Britain, but he had
nevertheless designed a loom and had completed a model which
seemed to work.

The partners took in with them Paul Moody of Amesbury, an expert
machinist, and by the autumn of 1814 looms were built and set up
at Waltham. Carding, drawing, and roving machines were also built
and installed in the mill, these machines gaining greatly, at
Moody's expert hands, over their American rivals. This was the
first mill in the United States, and one of the first in the
world, to combine under one roof all the operations necessary to
convert raw fiber into cloth, and it proved a success. Lowell,
says his partner Appleton, "is entitled to the credit for having
introduced the new system in the cotton manufacture." Jackson and