Louisa Maria Wells

“Out of the fibre of her daily tasks, she wove the fabric of a useful life.”

Louisa Maria Wells was born in Vermont to a farming family in 1815 and came to Lowell, MA as a teenager to work in the textile mills. Louisa never married.

When she died in 1886 she left money in her will to place a marker over her grave. Her cousins contested the will, and the money went into escrow. After 20 years of litigation the court decided against the cousins, and with the interest accrued there was enough to build more than the modest marker she had envisioned for herself.

Louisa’s monument was designed by Daniel Chester French and the construction was executed by Evelyn Longman. It portrays an exhausted mill worker being comforted by the Angel of Mercy. It was placed in Lowell Cemetery in 1907.