WOOL CULTURE AND SPINNING
_With a Postscript on Cotton_
The art of spinning was an honorable occupation for women as early as
the ninth century; and it was so universal that it furnished a legal
title by which an unmarried woman is known to this day. Spinster is the
only one of all her various womanly titles that survives; webster,
shepster, litster, brewster, and baxter are obsolete. The occupations
are also obsolete save those indicated by shepster and baxter--that is,
the cutting out of cloth and baking of bread; these are the only duties
among them all that she still performs.
The wool industry dates back to prehistoric man. The patience, care, and
skill involved in its manufacture have ever exercised a potent influence
on civilization. It is, therefore, interesting and gratifying to note
the intelligent eagerness of our first colonists for wool culture. It
was quickly and proudly noted of towns and of individuals as a proof of
their rapid and substantial progress that they could carry on any of the
steps of the cloth industry. Good Judge Sewall piously exulted when
Brother Moody started a successful fulling-mill in Boston. Johnson in
his _Wonder-working Providence_ tells with pride that by 1654 New
Englanders "have a fulling-mill and caused their little ones to be very
dilligent in spinning cotton-woole, many of them having been clothiers
in England." This has ever seemed to me one of the fortunate conditions
that tended to the marked success of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that
so many had been "clothiers" or cloth-workers in England; or had come
from shires in England where wool was raised and cloth made, and hence
knew the importance of the industry as well as its practical workings.
As early as 1643 the author of _New England's First Fruits_ wrote: "They
are making linens, fustians, dimities, and look immediately to woollens
from their own sheep." Johnson estimated the number of sheep in the
colony of Massachusetts, about 1644, as three thousand. Soon the great
wheel was whirring in every New England house. The raising of sheep was
encouraged in every way. They were permitted to graze on the commons; it
was forbidden to send them from the colony; no sheep under two years old
could be killed to sell; if a dog killed a sheep, the dog's owner must
hang him and pay double the cost of the sheep. All persons who were not
employed in other ways, as single women, girls, and boys, were required
to spin. Each family must contain one spinner. These spinners were
formed into divisions or "squadrons" of ten persons; each division had a
director. There were no drones in this hive; neither the wealth nor high
station of parents excused children from this work. Thus all were
levelled to one kind of labor, and by this levelling all were also
elevated to independence. When the open expression of revolt came, the
homespun industries seemed a firm rock for the foundation of liberty.
People joined in agreements to eat no lamb or mutton, that thus sheep
might be preserved, and to wear no imported woollen cloth. They gave
prizes for spinning and weaving.
Great encouragement was given in Virginia in early days to the raising
and manufacture of wool. The Assembly estimated that five children not
over thirteen years of age could by their work readily spin and weave
enough to keep thirty persons clothed. Six pounds of tobacco was paid to
any one bringing to the county court-house where he resided a yard of
homespun woollen cloth, made wholly in his family; twelve pounds of
tobacco were offered for reward for a dozen pair of woollen hose
knitted at home. Slaves were taught to spin; and wool-wheels and
wool-cards are found by the eighteenth century on every inventory of
planters' house furnishings.
The Pennsylvania settlers were early in the encouragement of wool
manufacture. The present industry of hosiery and knit goods long known
as Germantown goods began with the earliest settlers of that
Pennsylvania town. Stocking-weavers were there certainly as early as
1723; and it is asserted there were knitting-machines. At any rate, one
Mack, the son of the founder of the Dunkers, made "leg stockings" and
gloves. Rev. Andrew Burnaby, who was in Germantown in 1759, told of a
great manufacture of stockings at that date. In 1777 it was said that a
hundred Germantown stocking-weavers were out of employment through the
war. Still it was not till 1850 that patents for knitting-machines were
taken out there.
Among the manufactures of the province of Pennsylvania in 1698 were
druggets, serges, and coverlets; and among the registered tradesmen were
dyers, fullers, comb-makers, card-makers, weavers, and spinners. The
Swedish colony as early as 1673 had the wives and daughters "employing
themselves in spinning wool and flax and many in weaving." The fairs
instituted by William Penn for the encouragement of domestic
manufactures and trade in general, which were fostered by Franklin and
continued till 1775, briskly stimulated wool and flax manufacture.
In 1765 and in 1775 rebellious Philadelphians banded together with
promises not to eat or suffer to be eaten in their families any lamb or
"meat of the mutton kind"; in this the Philadelphia butchers, patriotic
and self-sacrificing, all joined. A wool-factory was built and fitted up
and an appeal made to the women to save the state. In a month four
hundred wool-spinners were at work. But the war cut off the supply of
raw material, and the manufacture languished. In 1790, after the war,
fifteen hundred sets of irons for spinning-wheels were sold from one
shop, and mechanics everywhere were making looms.
New Yorkers were not behindhand in industry. Lord Cornbury wrote home to
England, in 1705, that he "had seen serge made upon Long Island that any
man might wear; they make very good linen for common use; as for Woollen
I think they have brought that to too great perfection."
In Cornbury's phrase, "too great perfection," may be found the key for
all the extraordinary and apparently stupid prohibitions and
restrictions placed by the mother-country on colonial wool manufacture.
The growth of the woollen industry in any colony was regarded at once by
England with jealous eyes. Wool was the pet industry and principal
staple of Great Britain; and well it might be, for until the reign of
Henry VIII. English garments from head to foot were wholly of wool, even
the shoes. Wool was also received in England as currency. Thomas Fuller
said, "The wealth of our nation is folded up in broadcloth." Therefore,
the Crown, aided by the governors of the provinces, sought to maintain
England's monopoly by regulating and reducing the culture of wool in
America through prohibiting the exportation to England of any American
wool or woollen materials. In 1699 all vessels sailing to England from
the colonies were prohibited taking on board any "Wool, Woolfells,
Shortlings, Moslings, Wool Flocks, Worsteds, Bays, Bay or Woollen Yarn,
Cloath, Serge, Kersey, Says, Frizes, Druggets, Shalloons, etc."; and an
arbitrary law was passed prohibiting the transportation of home-made
woollens from one American province to another. These laws were never
fully observed and never checked the culture and manufacture of wool in
this country. Hence our colonies were spared the cruel fate by which
England's same policy paralyzed and obliterated in a few years the
glorious wool industry of Ireland. Luckily for us, it is further across
the Atlantic Ocean than across St. George's Channel.
The "all-wool goods a yard wide," which we so easily purchase to-day,
meant to the colonial dame or daughter the work of many weeks and
months, from the time when the fleeces were first given to her deft
hands. Fleeces had to be opened with care, and have all pitched or
tarred locks, dag-locks, brands, and feltings cut out. These cuttings
were not wasted, but were spun into coarse yarn. The white locks were
carefully tossed and separated and tied into net bags with tallies to be
dyed. Another homely saying, "dyed in the wool," showed a process of
much skill. Blue, in all shades, was the favorite color, and was dyed
with indigo. So great was the demand for this dye-stuff that
indigo-pedlers travelled over the country selling it.
Madder, cochineal, and logwood dyed beautiful reds. The bark of red oak
or hickory made very pretty shades of brown and yellow. Various flowers
growing on the farm could be used for dyes. The flower of the goldenrod,
when pressed of its juice, mixed with indigo, and added to alum, made a
beautiful green. The juice of the pokeberry boiled with alum made
crimson dye, and a violet juice from the petals of the iris, or
"flower-de-luce," that blossomed in June meadows, gave a delicate light
purple tinge to white wool.
The bark of the sassafras was used for dyeing yellow or orange color,
and the flowers and leaves of the balsam also. Fustic and copperas gave
yellow dyes. A good black was obtained by boiling woollen cloth with a
quantity of the leaves of the common field-sorrel, then boiling again
with logwood and copperas.
In the South there were scores of flowers and leaves that could be used
for dyes. During the Revolutionary War one enterprising South Carolinian
got a guinea a pound for a yellow dye he made from the sweet-leaf or
horse-laurel. The leaves and berries of gall-berry bush made a good
black much used by hatters and weavers. The root of the barberry gave
wool a beautiful yellow, as did the leaves of the devil's-bit. The
petals of Jerusalem artichoke and St.-John's-wort dyed yellow. Yellow
root is a significant name and reveals its use: oak, walnut, or maple
bark dyed brown. Often the woven cloth was dyed, not the wool.
The next process was carding; the wool was first greased with rape oil
or "melted swine's grease," which had to be thoroughly worked in; about
three pounds of grease were put into ten pounds of wool. Wool-cards were
rectangular pieces of thin board, with a simple handle on the back or
at the side; to this board was fastened a smaller rectangle of strong
leather, set thick with slightly bent wire teeth, like a coarse brush.
The carder took one card with her left hand, and resting it on her knee,
drew a tuft of wool across it several times, until a sufficient quantity
of fibre had been caught upon the wire teeth. She then drew the second
wool-card, which had to be warmed, across the first several times, until
the fibres were brushed parallel by all these "tummings." Then by a
deft and catchy motion the wool was rolled or carded into small fleecy
rolls which were then ready for spinning.
Wool-combs were shaped like the letter T, with about thirty long steel
teeth from ten to eighteen inches long set at right angles with the top
of the T. The wool was carefully placed on one comb, and with careful
strokes the other comb laid the long staple smooth for hard-twisted
spinning. It was tedious and slow work, and a more skilful operation
than carding; and the combs had to be kept constantly heated; but no
machine-combing ever equalled hand-combing. There was a good deal of
waste in this combing, that is, large clumps of tangled wool called noil
were combed out. They were not really wasted, we may be sure, by our
frugal ancestors, but were spun into coarse yarn.
An old author says: "The action of spinning must be learned by practice,
not by relation." Sung by the poets, the grace and beauty of the
occupation has ever shared praise with its utility.
Wool-spinning was truly one of the most flexible and alert series of
movements in the world, and to its varied and graceful poises our
grandmothers may owe part of the dignity of carriage that was so
characteristic of them. The spinner stood slightly leaning forward,
lightly poised on the ball of the left foot; with her left hand she
picked up from the platform of the wheel a long slender roll of the soft
carded wool about as large round as the little finger, and deftly wound
the end of the fibres on the point of the spindle. She then gave a
gentle motion to the wheel with a wooden peg held in her right hand,
and seized with the left the roll at exactly the right distance from the
spindle to allow for one "drawing." Then the hum of the wheel rose to a
sound like the echo of wind; she stepped backward quickly, one, two,
three steps, holding high the long yarn as it twisted and quivered.
Suddenly she glided forward with even, graceful stride and let the yarn
wind on the swift spindle. Another pinch of the wool-roll, a new turn of
the wheel, and _da capo_.
The wooden peg held by the spinner deserves a short description; it
served the purpose of an elongated finger, and was called a driver,
wheel-peg, etc. It was about nine inches long, an inch or so in
diameter; and at about an inch from the end was slightly grooved in
order that it might surely catch the spoke and thus propel the wheel.
It was a good day's work for a quick, active spinner to spin six skeins
of yarn a day. It was estimated that to do that with her quick backward
and forward steps she walked over _twenty miles_.
The yarn might be wound directly upon the wooden spindle as it was spun,
or at the end of the spindle might be placed a spool or broach which
twisted with the revolving spindle, and held the new-spun yarn. This
broach was usually simply a stiff roll of paper, a corn-cob, or a roll
of corn-husk. When the ball of yarn was as large as the broach would
hold, the spinner placed wooden pegs in certain holes in the spokes of
her spinning-wheel and tied the end of the yarn to one peg. Then she
took off the belt of her wheel and whirred the big wheel swiftly round,
thus winding the yarn on the pegs into hanks or clews two yards in
circumference, which were afterwards tied with a loop of yarn into knots
of forty threads; while seven of these knots made a skein. The
clock-reel was used for winding yarn, also a triple reel.
The yarn might be wound from the spindle into skeins in another way,--by
using a hand-reel, an implement which really did exist in every
farmhouse, though the dictionaries are ignorant of it, as they are of
its universal folk-name, niddy-noddy. This is fortunately preserved in
an every-day domestic riddle:--
"Niddy-noddy, niddy-noddy,
Two heads and one body."
The three pieces of these niddy-noddys were set together at curious
angles, and are here shown rather than described in words. Holding the
reel in the left hand by seizing the central "body" or rod, the yarn was
wound from end to end of the reel, by an odd, waving, wobbling motion,
into knots and skeins of the same size as by the first process
described. One of these niddy-noddys was owned by Nabby Marshall of
Deerfield, who lived to be one hundred and four years old. The other
was brought from Ireland in 1733 by Hugh Maxwell, father of the
Revolutionary patriot Colonel Maxwell. As it was at a time of English
prohibitions and restrictions of American manufactures, this
niddy-noddy, as an accessory and promoter of colonial wool manufacture,
was smuggled into the country.
Sometimes the woollen yarn was spun twice; especially if a close,
hard-twisted thread was desired, to be woven into a stiff, wiry cloth.
When there were two, the first spinning was called a roving. The single
spinning was usually deemed sufficient to furnish yarn for knitting,
where softness and warmth were the desired requisites.
It was the pride of a good spinster to spin the finest yarn, and one
Mistress Mary Prigge spun a pound of wool into fifty hanks of
eighty-four thousand yards; in all, nearly forty-eight miles. If the
yarn was to be knitted, it had to be washed and cleansed. The wife of
Colonel John May, a prominent man in Boston, wrote in her diary for one
day:--
"A large kettle of yarn to attend upon. Lucretia and self rinse,
scour through many waters, get out, dry, attend to, bring in, do up
and sort 110 score of yarn; this with baking and ironing. Then went
to hackling flax."
It should be remembered that all those bleaching processes, the wringing
out and rinsing in various waters, were far more wearisome then than
they would be to-day, for the water had to be carried laboriously in
pails and buckets, and drawn with pumps and well-sweeps; there were no
pipes and conduits. Happy the household that had a running brook near
the kitchen door.
Of course all these operations and manipulations usually occupied many
weeks and months, but they could be accomplished in a much shorter time.
When President Nott of Union College, and his brother Samuel, the famous
preacher, were boys on a stony farm in Connecticut, one of the brothers
needed a new suit of clothes, and as the father was sick there was
neither money nor wool in the house. The mother sheared some half-grown
fleece from her sheep, and in less than a week the boy wore it as
clothing. The shivering and generous sheep were protected by wrappings
of braided straw. During the Revolution, it is said that in a day and a
night a mother and her daughters in Townsend, Massachusetts, sheared a
black and a white sheep, carded from the fleece a gray wool, spun, wove,
cut and made a suit of clothes for a boy to wear off to fight for
liberty.
The wool industry easily furnished home occupation to an entire family.
Often by the bright firelight in the early evening every member of the
household might be seen at work on the various stages of wool
manufacture or some of its necessary adjuncts, and varied and cheerful
industrial sounds fill the room. The old grandmother, at light and easy
work, is carding the wool into fleecy rolls, seated next the fire; for,
as the ballad says, "she was old and saw right dimly." The mother,
stepping as lightly as one of her girls, spins the rolls into woollen
yarn on the great wheel. The oldest daughter sits at the clock-reel,
whose continuous buzz and occasional click mingles with the humming rise
and fall of the wool-wheel, and the irritating scratch, scratch, of the
cards. A little girl at a small wheel is filling quills with woollen
yarn for the loom, not a skilled work; the irregular sound shows her
intermittent industry. The father is setting fresh teeth in a wool-card,
while the boys are whittling hand-reels and loom-spools.
One of the household implements used in wool manufacture, the wool-card,
deserves a short special history as well as a description. In early days
the leather back of the wool-card was pierced with an awl by hand; the
wire teeth were cut off from a length of wire, were slightly bent, and
set and clinched one by one. These cards were laboriously made by many
persons at home, for their household use. As early as 1667 wire was made
in Massachusetts; and its chief use was for wool-cards. By
Revolutionary times it was realized that the use of wool-cards was
almost the mainspring of the wool industry, and L100 bounty was offered
by Massachusetts for card-wire made in the state from iron mined in what
they called then the "United American States." In 1784 a machine was
invented by an American which would cut and bend thirty-six thousand
wire teeth an hour. Another machine pierced the leather backs. This gave
a new employment to women and children at home and some spending-money.
They would get boxes of the bent wire teeth and bundles of the leather
backs from the factories and would set the teeth in the backs while
sitting around the open fire in the evening. They did this work, too,
while visiting--spending an afternoon; and it was an unconscious and
diverting work like knitting; scholars set wool-cards while studying,
and schoolmistresses while teaching. This method of manufacture was
superseded fifteen years later by a machine invented by Amos Whittemore,
which held, cut, and pierced the leather, drew the wire from a reel, cut
and bent a looped tooth, set it, bent it, fastened the leather on the
back, and speedily turned out a fully made card. John Randolph said this
machine had everything but an immortal soul. By this time spinning and
weaving machinery began to crowd out home work, and the machine-made
cards were needed to keep up with the increased demand. At last machines
crowded into every department of cloth manufacture; and after
carding-machines were invented in England--great rollers set with
card-teeth--they were set up in many mills throughout the United States.
Families soon sent all their wool to these mills to be carded even when
it was spun and woven at home. It was sent rolled up in a homespun sheet
or blanket pinned with thorns; and the carded rolls ready for spinning
were brought home in the same way, and made a still bigger bundle which
was light in weight for its size. Sometimes a red-cheeked farmer's lass
would be seen riding home from the carding-mill, through New England
woods or along New England lanes, with a bundle of carded wool towering
up behind her bigger than her horse.
Of the use and manufacture of cotton I will speak very shortly. Our
greatest, cheapest, most indispensable fibre is also our latest one. It
never formed one of the homespun industries of the colonies; in fact, it
was never an article of extended domestic manufacture.
A little cotton was always used in early days for stuffing bedquilts,
petticoats, warriors' armor, and similar purposes. It was bought by the
pound, East India cotton, in small quantities; the seeds were picked
out one by one, by hand; it was carded on wool-cards, and spun into a
rather intractable yarn which was used as warp for linsey-woolsey and
rag carpets. Even in England no cotton weft, no all-cotton fabrics, were
made till after 1760, till Hargreave's time. Sometimes a twisted yarn
was made of one thread of cotton and one of wool which was knit into
durable stockings. Cotton sewing-thread was unknown in England.
Pawtucket women named Wilkinson made the first cotton thread on their
home spinning-wheels in 1792.
Cotton was planted in America, Bancroft says, in 1621, but MacMaster
asserts it was never seen growing here till after the Revolution save as
a garden ornament with garden flowers. This assertion seems oversweeping
when Jefferson could write in a letter in 1786:--
"The four southermost States make a great deal of cotton. Their
poor are almost entirely clothed with it in winter and summer. In
winter they wear shirts of it and outer clothing of cotton and wool
mixed. In summer their shirts are linen, but the outer clothing
cotton. The dress of the women is almost entirely of cotton,
manufactured by themselves, except the richer class, and even many
of these wear a great deal of homespun cotton. It is as well
manufactured as the calicoes of Europe."
Still cotton was certainly not a staple of consequence. We were the last
to enter the list of cotton-producing countries and we have surpassed
them all.
The difficulty of removing the seeds from the staple practically thrust
cotton out of common use. In India a primitive and cumbersome set of
rollers called a churka partially cleaned India cotton. A Yankee
schoolmaster, Eli Whitney, set King Cotton on a throne by his invention
of the cotton-gin in 1792. This comparatively simple but inestimable
invention completely revolutionized cloth manufacture in England and
America. It also changed general commerce, industrial development, and
the social and economic order of things, for it gave new occupations and
offered new modes of life to hundreds of thousands of persons. It
entirely changed and cheapened our dress, and altered rural life both in
the North and South.
A man could, by hand-picking, clean only about a pound of cotton a day.
The cotton-gin cleaned as much in a day as had taken the hand-picker a
year to accomplish. Cotton was at once planted in vast amounts; but it
certainly was not plentiful till then. Whitney had never seen cotton nor
cotton seed when he began to plan his invention; nor did he, even in
Savannah, find cotton to experiment with until after considerable
search.
After the universal manufacture and use of the cotton-gin, negro women
wove cotton in Southern houses, sometimes spinning their own cotton
thread; more frequently buying it mill-spun. But, after all, this was in
too small amounts to be of importance; it needed the spinning-jennies
and power-looms of vast mills to use up the profuse supply afforded by
the gin.
A very interesting account of the domestic manufacture of cotton in
Tennessee about the year 1850 was written for me by Mrs. James Stuart
Pilcher, State Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution in
Tennessee. A portion of her pleasant story reads:--
"There were two looms in the loom-room, and two negro women were
kept busy all the time weaving; there were eight or ten others who
did nothing but spin cotton and woollen thread; others spooled and
reeled it into hanks. The spinning was all done on the large wheel,
from the raw cotton; a corn-shuck was wrapped tightly around the
steel spindle, then the thread was run and spun on this shuck until
it was full; then these were reeled off into hanks of thread, then
spooled on to corn-cobs with holes burned through them. These were
placed in an upright frame, with long slender rods of hickory wood
something like a ramrod run through them. The frame held about one
hundred of these cob-spools; the end of the cotton thread from
each spool was gathered up by an experienced warper who carried all
the threads back and forth on the large warping-bars; this was a
difficult task; only the brightest negro women were warpers. The
thread had been dyed before spooling and the vari-colored
cob-spools could be arranged to make stripes lengthwise of the
cloth; and the hanks had also been dipped in a boiling-hot sizing
made of meal and water. The warp-threads were carefully taken from
the bars and rolled upon the wooden beam of the loom, the ends
passed through the sley and tied. The weaver then began her work.
The thread for the filling (called the woof by the negroes) was
reeled from the hank on the winding-blades, upon small canes about
four inches long which, when full, were placed in the wooden
shuttles. These women spun and wove all the clothing worn by the
negroes on the plantation; cotton cloth for women and men in the
summer time; and jeans for the men; linsey-woolsey for the women
and children for winter. All were well clothed. The women taught us
to spin, but the weavers were cross and would not let us touch the
loom, for they said we broke the threads in the warp. My
grandmother never interfered with them when they were careful in
their work. We would say, 'Please make Aunt Rhody let me weave!'
She answered, 'No, she is managing the loom; if she is willing,
very well; if not, you must not worry her.' We thought it great fun
to try to weave, but generally had to pay Aunt Rhody for our
meddling by giving her cake, ribbons, or candy."
The colonists were constantly trying to find new materials for spinning,
and also used many makeshifts. Parkman, in his _Old Regime_, tells that
in the year 1704, when a ship was lost that was to bring cloth and wool
to Quebec, a Madame de Repentigny, one of the aristocrats of the
French-Canadian colony, spun and wove coarse blankets of nettle and
linden bark. Similar experiments were made by the English colonists.
Coarse thread was spun out of nettle-fibre by pioneers in western New
York. Levi Beardsley, in his _Reminiscences_, tells of his mother at the
close of the last century, in her frontier home at Richfield Springs,
weaving bags and coarse garments from the nettles which grew so rankly
everywhere in that vicinity. Deer hair and even cow's hair was collected
from the tanners, spun with some wool, and woven into a sort of felted
blanket.
Silk-grass, a much-vaunted product, was sent back to England on the
first ships and was everywhere being experimented with. Coarse wicking
was spun from the down of the milkweed--an airy, feathery material that
always looks as if it ought to be put to many uses, yet never has seemed
of much account in any trial that has been made of it.