THE LOWELLS OF MASSACHUSETTS: An American Family

Nonfiction
Abolition on Earth, canals on Mars

THE LOWELLS OF MASSACHUSETTS:
An American Family
By Nina Sankovitch
382 pp. St. Martin’s

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D.

Over fifteen generations the Lowell clan, originally the Lowle family of Bristol, England managed to be a successful and productive family in New England life. Through this well-written book the author shows the family morphing from prominence in religion to manufacturing to public service to astronomy and then into literature. Though there are setbacks, sometimes major ones, the family seems to survive through it all as if it were a living entity.

The family left England because though prosperous, the taxes and duties were rising, harvests had failed and then, in 1639, the King called for able-bodied men to join a fight against Scotland. The family settled in the small community of Newbury north of Boston. Church was important, and the Congregationalist Puritans did not want to create a new church like the Pilgrims. They wanted to reform the English Church. One Sunday, “A Newbury woman came naked to the Sunday-morning services at the meetinghouse. Lydia Wardell was bare from her head to toes, an offering she made to prove that man is born good, innocent and humble…Lydia was arrested, forcibly reclothed, dragged to the Regional Court, which had convened in a tavern. The court fined her and sentenced her to a public whipping. For the whipping of thirty lashes, she was stripped naked (deemed a sign of wickedness, not innocence) and tied to a rail outside the tavern.” What she had thought to be a symbol of her innocence, the authorities deemed it a symbol of shame.

Conflict with Britain was a recurring theme of the early years for the Lowell family. “Long before the Boston Tea Party, a boycott of English tea spread throughout the towns and villages of New England.” Locals brewed strawberry leaves, currant leaves, four-leaf loosestrife and ribwort, but none tasted as good as the real thing.

Over the generations the Lowell family centered on two properties, first Elmwood and later, Sevenels (seven L’s). “When the bushes bloomed in the spring, it was as if the house were alive,” the author writes, “Breathing out exhalations of purple and fuchsia, and taking in gulps of green.”

The strong abolitionist views of the family were sorely tested during the Civil War. William Putnam, son of Mary Lowell volunteered for the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which included Charles Cabot, Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, and Paul Revere. The twentieth was sent on an “easy assignment” in September of 1861 against an unsuspecting rebel force. “Instead of a clear path to easy victory, the soldiers of the Twentieth found themselves in hell,” Sankovitch tells us. Will was shot through the abdomen. Three other members of the family died before the slaves were emancipated.

In the early twentieth century, Percival Lowell captivated the popular imagination with his studies of Mars and its canals from an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 1907 the Wall Street Journal wrote, “What is the most extraordinary event of the past twelve months? The proof …that conscious, intelligent human life exists on the planet Mars.” No matter the inaccuracy of such a claim, the Lowells contributed selflessly to the society around them.

The author writes this family chronicle in a well-organized and easily readable style, and the pages fly by.

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