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Dutton Yarn Building
Dutton Yarn Building
Saco-Lowell Shops – Building #15
1923
Dutton Yarn Building c.2003 Dutton Yarn Building 2004
Building History
Built on the site of the Lowell Machine Shop’s company housing, Building #15 was built in 1923 and represented the last building erected by the Saco-Lowell Shops. Originally established in 1824 by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company to manufacture machinery for their mill, the Machine Shop was sold to the Locks and Canals Corporation in 1825. By 1845, the Lowell Machine Shop became an independent corporation and by 1911, it was the largest of four machine manufacturers, which later merged to form the Saco-Lowell Shops. From the time of the merger until the late 1920s, the Lowell Machine Shop yard was active; however, in the late 1920s, the yard was closed and its equipment sold or transferred. Within the next decade, virtually all its buildings were demolished.
The Lowell Machine Shop contained a machinery shop, foundry, and sawmill that produced most of the water power machinery and manufacturing machinery used in the initial development of Lowell’s major mills. Through the years, the company was one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of machinists’ tools, cotton and woolen machinery, turbines, locomotive and stationary engines, boilers, and steam engines.
Building #15 stands near the corner of Dutton and Broadway Streets and is a four-story structure built of reinforced concrete. The building’s exterior is framed into bays of equal size by concrete piers, between which are brick panels and steel-framed windows. Along with the former Forge Shop to the rear, it was the last building constructed in Lowell by the company.
Preservation and Reuse
After the closure of the Saco-Lowell Shops and demolition of much of its buildings, most people in the region knew Building #15 as the Giant Store. Home to a variety of business establishments, the first reference to the Giant Store occurs in the 1934 City directory. The store existed in various forms until the early 1970s and by 1973, radio station WLLH occupied a small portion of the building. By the early 1980s, industrial use returned to building in the form of Joan Fabrics Corporation and a subsidiary known as the Dutton Yarn Company.
Vacated several years ago, the property was acquired by a private developer in 2003 and has been converted into 130 apartments The rehabilitation of this block-long building included repairs to the concrete exterior as well as restoration of the building’s distinguishing steel-frame windows and replication in steel of all missing windows.