Being a booming city with many low-skilled jobs, waves of immigrants came into Lowell to work the mills. The original 30 Irish that came to help build the canals were led by Hugh Cummiskey along the Middlesex canal from Charlestown to Pawtucket Falls on foot April 6, 1822. They were met by Kirk Boott and given a pittance. No allowance was made for housing or other provisioning. These were followed by a new group after the Great Famine of Ireland, and later Catholic Germans. These Irish were herded onto land that was not under the control of the mills into an area now called "The Acre" - but at that point called "Paddy Camp Lands". Ethnic tensions - sometimes stoked by mill companies seeking to use members of one community as strikebreakers against members of another - were not unheard of, and in the 1840s, the nativist, anti-Catholic American Party (often called the Know-Nothing Party) won elections in Lowell. By the 1850s, industry competition increased as more manufacturing centers were built elsewhere, Lowell's mills employed increasing numbers of immigrant families, and the early "Lowell System" of Yankee women workers living in company boardinghouses was transformed. In its place, large, densely populated ethnic neighborhoods grew around the city, their residents more rooted in their churches, organizations, and communities than the previous era's company boardinghouse dwellers.