 In 1916, the Bigelow Carpet Company, which had previously purchased the Lowell Manufacturing Company, left Lowell.This was the first of the major corporations to move operations to the South or go bankrupt.World War I briefly improved the situation, but from 1926 to 1929, most of the rest of the companies, including the Lowell Machine Shop (which had become the Saco-Lowell Shops) left the city