<P> Eventually, cheaper and less organized foreign labor replaced the mill girls . Even by the time of the founding of Lawrence in 1845, there were questions being raised about its viability . One of the leading causes of this transition to foreign labor and the demise of the system was the coming of the Civil War . Girls went to be nurses, back to their farms, or into positions that men had left when they went to the army . These girls were out of the mills for the duration of the war and when the mills reopened after the war, the girls were gone because they no longer needed the mills . They had rooted into their new occupations or moved on in life to the point where the mill was no longer suitable for them . The lack of mill girls created a movement towards Irish immigrants . </P> <P> The Irish community that was building in Lowell, Massachusetts was not exclusively female unlike the grouping of mill girls in the dormitories . The proportion of male employment at the mill increased which rapidly changed the demographics of the people that work there . The Lowell plant became heavily dependent on the foreign lower - class, especially the Irish immigrants that flocked to Massachusetts . This reliance on foreign workers forced the mills to become what they had been trying to avoid with the mill girls . Poverty snuck up on them and they were forced to deal with slums and a poor lower - class . These immigrants tended to have families and they did not live in the dormitory style of the mill girls . While in many cases the boardinghouses outlived the system, families of immigrant workers typically lived in tenement neighborhoods, and off company property . </P>

The waltham plan later known as the lowell system