father died in 1832, leaving her mother as a widow with ten children to raise. Mr. Larcom's death coincided with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Lowell. The Lowell Mills were hiring young women as factory workers and older women to run the boarding houses where the Lowell Mill Girls lived. Mrs. Larcom found employment as a boarding house supervisor while Lucy and her siblings found employment in the mills. While in Lowell, she helped her mother with household work in the intervals between her hours of school and work. Career Lowell Mill Girl At age eleven, in 1835, she began working at Boott Mills, a cotton mill in Lowell, as a doffer, to earn extra money for her family. She was among the very youngest of those employed at the mills. Her first work as a Lowell operative was in a spinning-room, doffing and replacing the bobbins, after which she tended a spinning-frame and then a dressing-frame, while looking out windows towards the river. Later, she was employed in a "cloth-room," considered to be a more agreeable working-place because of its fewer hours of confinement, its cleanliness, and the absence of machinery. The last two years of her Lowell life, which covered in all a period of about ten years, were spent in that room, not in measuring cloth, but as bookkeeper, recording the number of pieces and bales. There, she pursued her studies during leisure moments, some textbooks in mathematics, grammar, English or German literature usually laying open on her desk. Here, as in her earlier childhood, she put words to her visions through verses and by telling herself stories. Of those days, Larcom stated,— "While yet a child, I used to consider it special good fortune that my home was at Lowell. There was a frank friendliness and sincerity in the social atmosphere that wrought upon me unconsciously, and made the place pleasant to live in. People moved about their every-day duties with purpose and zest, and were genuinely interested in one another; while in the towns on the seaboard it sometimes was as if every man's house was his castle in almost a feudal sense, where the family shut themselves in, on the defensive against intruders." Still, she never lost her love and allegiance to the seaside area where she was born, while frequent visits kept up the charm, and gave her links to her