Lowell National Historic Park Has Its Exhibits Under Scrutiny for Violating the Presidents Order

Lowell’s National Historic Park in Massachusetts is an excellent place to learn about immigrant and women workers throughout the Industrial Revolution. It also offers lessons on enslaved workers who produced the cotton for textiles that was used, and for the early history of the labor movement. What could go wrong?

I have been spending the last month looking at the exhibits, artifacts, and signage that Interior Department employees have flagged for possibly being against President Trump’s 2025 Executive Order telling the Interior Department, of which the National Park Service is a part, to review everything at the National Parks and find items and verbiage that should be redacted.

Last year the president issued one of his first Executive Orders calling for the National Park Service (NPS) to restore “sanity” in telling United States history. In the Fall of 2025 the Interior Department ordered individual sites to identify signage and exhibits that violate the new executive order. I have been examining the sites which have submitted controversial exhibits to their superiors for removal or rewriting. At the end of February, insiders at the Interior Department leaked those exhibits which are being considered. The photos in this article were taken by employees of the Interior Department and submitted as potentially violative of the Executive Order.

The president’s Executive Order says that some of the National Parks harm the “United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” The president says that proper history should “foster unity.” He writes that “Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” The president sketches out how the National Park Service should approach history:

“It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. ”

While many school kids know about Lowell because it allowed farming girls to get jobs in the city making textiles and clothing, most of the flagged signage has to do with Black people and immigrants. The above card talks about how Blacks down South were enslaved to plant, care for, and harvest cotton. Many other National Park Service sites have identified references to slavery as being against the Executive Order.

Next, the museum tries to familiarize visitors with the lives of the people who handled cotton as slaves. Solomon Northrup became one of the most famous of these workers after he wrote Twelve Years a Slave, later made into a movie.

There is a map showing where cotton was picked by slaves, as well as a device for the punishment of slaves.

The text ties cotton production and clothing manufacturing into the slave system. The card may be suspect because it calls this labor system “the brutal institution of slavery.”

There is also a transcription of a warning from the owner of a mill threatening to fire anyone who votes for future Union General Ben Butler and his political colleagues who want to shorten the workday to ten hours. Interestingly, I have seen more exhibits that mention Ben Butler getting flagged for possible removal than any other Union general!

When the Civil War broke out, according to Charles Cowley, ten thousand employees were laid off. Obviously the Interior Department does not want to show workers losing their jobs. There are no notes explaining why these were flagged, but as in other exhibits at other sites, it points to possible class divisions inside the United States.

The card above says that the immigrant workers at Lowell were often played off against each other by the bosses. While there is a sentimental memory of the Lowell workers as young native-born women, in reality most workers were immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Canadians from Quebec, and later Italians and Polish. There were labor organizations to help the workers bargain collectively, but the employers would use any excuse to split the workers by ethnicity.

This is a call to action for the workers to unite back from 1845. This sort of working class agitation may violate the Executive Order.

The Liberator, an Abolitionist newspaper, would publicize the illegal holding of Blacks as slaves. This could be flagged simply because it mentions slavery, or because it points to the Black community and their allies resisting illegal enslavement.

This card is about organizing to set up an African American church. This may be tagged for potential removal because it mentions the discomfort that whites and Blacks have living in the same community.

When the native-born went after the Irish, the immigrants responded with stones and bricks from their slum, The Acre. This might be flagged because it highlights immigrants in the 19th Century responding to being targeted with their own resistance actions.

Note that the exhibits cover Lowell from the 1600s up through the 21st Century and I have not included anything outside of the Civil War/Reconstruction Era in this review.