She was a “mill girl,” one of the many who worked in the textile factories of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the early nineteenth century. Lucy Larcom (1824-1893) was born into a family of ten children. Her dad, a retired sea captain, taught his children in the way of Jesus until his death in 1832, when Lucy was eight. Her mom, with no income to support ten children, moved to Lowell to become a boarding house manager, cooking, and keeping house for forty female workers employed at the mills.
Lucy began working at the mill at age eleven. She worked in the spinning-room from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., with a half hour for breakfast and lunch. Her weekly pay after room and board was a dollar. She spent ten years working in the mills.
To mitigate against the numbing influence of tedious factory work, she turned to poetry. She joined an evening writing group at church and published her poems in a literary magazine which caught the admiration of a fellow poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Her can-do attitude was expressed in her words, “I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discord could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.”
At twenty-two, she moved with her married sister and family to rural Illinois, where she taught in a log cabin schoolhouse. She eventually returned to Lowell to teach at Wheaton Seminary (now Wheaton College in Massachusetts). She continued to write poems that eventually filled fifteen volumes. Her most enduring work is a book of reflections on her growing-up years, A New England Girlhood, which provides details on what childhood was like in her day.
Her poetry expresses a deep love of God and trust in Jesus. She wrote, “Whatever science and philosophy may do for mankind, the world can never outgrow its need for the simplicity that is in Christ.” The following poem of hers is called “Our Prayers.”