Lowell's early history was inextricably linked to slavery through its many cotton mills where young women from rural New England and immigrants from Europe wove what Black people from slave-holding states in the South picked.
One vehement opponent of slavery was the first rector at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Edson, who offered the church as a stop on the Underground Railroad in the pre-Civil War era. Edson and his work with the abolitionist movement was the topic of a discussion held Feb. 23 in the chapel at St. Anne’s.
In a presentation titled “Freedom Seekers, the Underground Railroad and St. Anne’s Lowell,” Jacquelynn Coles, representing the Black Lowell Coalition, and Robert Forrant, a professor of history at UMass Lowell, explored the role the church played in the abolitionist movement.