Country Images Magazine North Edition September 2017 | Page 50

business, which included introducing the US
elite to Derby Porcelain, compass dials (of
which the latter could well have been products
of Whitehurst’s Derby works) and many other
mainly local products. He was naturalized a
US citizen in November 1787 becoming very
wealthy, leaving at his death in 1817 fi ve sons and
four daughters.
Th e most important outcome of this migration
lay in the career of Boott’s third son, also Kirk
(1790-1837). Whilst the eldest son initially
returned to London to run that end of the
family business, Kirk II was also sent to England
to be educated, going to school in Ashbourne
and then Rugby, and making numerous visits
to family in Derby. Aft er returning to study for
three years at Harvard, he went back to Britain
to join the army, seeing action as a Captain in
the 85th (Bucks. Volunteers) Regiment in the
Peninsular campaign 1812-1814 before getting a
peacetime posting at Sheffi eld Garrison to avoid
having to fi ght with his unit in the US campaign
that resulted in the sack of Washington and the
burning of the White House under Maj.-Gen.
Robert Ross.
He visited Derby frequently at this time, staying
at St. Helen’s House with William Strutt, with
the Wrights, and his aunt, Mrs. Horrocks. On
these visits he met and wooed and in 1818
married Anne, a daughter of the Strutts’ friend
Alderman Th omas Haden, physician and protégé
of Erasmus Darwin, who had been mayor of
Derby in 1811 and 1819. Dr. Haden had been
painted by Joseph Wright as a child, and had
been the junior partner and successor of Joseph’s
second brother Richard in his medical practice
in St. Alkmund’s Church Yard. Kirk Boott
himself visited the local textile mills in 1817–18
as the guest of their co-proprietor, Strutt. Once
married, however, he resigned his commission
and returned to America.
Either Kirk Boott junior, the cofounder of Lowell, oil
painting [Private collection]
Or Kirk Boott junior, engraved portrait [MHS]
the dedication was in honour of his wife. Maria
Edgeworth, daughter of the Lunar Society
luminary and Irish landowner Richard Lovel
Edgeworth, who had extensive American
property, kept William Strutt fully informed
of Boott’s enter¬prise, which appears to have
continued to have Strutt’s blessing.
Like Strutt, too, Boott was a competent architect,
designing not only the church but workers’
housing, mills and municipal buildings, some of
which survive. His biggest mill has a tower with
Derby and Lowell
From 1821 Boott was co-founder, with Francis
Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton and Patrick T.
Jackson, of a new settlement at East Chelmsford,
of the confl uence of the Merrimack and
Pawtucket rivers in Massachusetts. Th is was to be
a cotton-spinning city, and Boott’s role was to set
it up and run it. He had hoped to call it Derby,
but the sudden death of Lowell led to its being
given his name instead. Lowell himself, the scion
of a patrician family of Boston merchants had
also visited Britain and originated the idea of a
model textile industry in New England to rival
Samuel Slater’s Pawtucket Mills, set up a little
before, using ideas pirated from the Strutts at
Belper. Boott, on the other hand, had the support
of the Strutts in his enterprise, which was an
important diff erence.
In 1824, Boott personally designed St Anne’s
Church, which he based on old St. Michael’s,
Derby, in which he had been married, whereas
50 | CountryImagesMagazine.co.uk
an octagonal bell turret, a rather ornate version
of that on our Silk Mill, itself part designed by
Joseph Strutt aft er a serious fi re in the 1820s. In
the end, the City of Lowell was a great success.
Francis, Boott’s London-based nephew, later
married Kirk Boott’s daughter, Eliza Haden
Boott, and their daughter Mary in turn married
her English cousin Charles Sydenham Haden,
thus helping to keep up the Derby link. One of
the entrepreneurs attracted to the new city by
Boott was George Washington Whistler, who
Woodcut of the church of St Anne, Lowell, c. 1830 [Private collection]