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 £100 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 Régime_, tells that in the year 1704, when a ship was lost that was to bring cloth and wool to Quebec, a Madame de Rèpentigny, 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.
