An “Industrious Revolution”: Textile Production in New England

Detail of a 17th-century English
broadside depicting the many parts of
the woolen industry

When colonists first came to New England in the 1630s, they brought with them the technology that had been used for centuries to produce linen and wool textiles—not only looms and spinning wheels, but hatchels, flails, bobbins, quills, reels, and niddy-noddies. However, they left behind the large-scale textile production that had developed in England since the middle ages. 

In England, labor was divided among families and individuals and organized by middlemen who sold and shipped raw fiber, spun yarn, and undyed cloth all over the country until the finished product was complete. Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 that even the simplest laborer’s woolen coat was the end result of a complex chain: “The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production.” 

New England colonists did not attempt to reproduce this system. For one, there simply weren’t enough people in 17th-century New England to do it. Even if there had been, English law “prohibited the export by ship of raw wool, yarn, or finished fabrics” from any English colony in order to protect the mother country’s textile industry. Nor was inter-colonial trade permitted. So whatever textiles colonists produced were for their own household use or for local exchange.

Family working together to process flax, 1780s

The other significant difference between the old world and the new was that in New England, women became weavers. In Europe, weaving was strictly a male occupation—guild regulations forbade weavers from employing their female relatives. But over time, in New England, weaving shifted from being a skill practiced by male artisans and learned through apprenticeship, to one performed by women within a network of neighbors who exchanged labor and tools. Although later writers like Horace Bushnell looked back to a golden Age of Homespun in which women produced all the textiles for their household, in reality, domestic production supplemented but did not replace imported cloth. It was one piece of the larger household economy.

Woman spinning with water mill
in background

If there ever really was a “golden age” of domestic textile production, it was probably the period from around 1790 to the 1830s, when the introduction of machines that combed wool and spun cotton allowed women to dramatically step up their production. By producing more textiles for their own use or for exchange, women were able to acquire more imported goods—calicos and chintzes, china and clocks. They were thus a key part of what historians have called the “industrious revolution”—an increase in the demand for goods which encouraged households to organize their labor in such a way that would produce disposable income.

Later writers tended to idealize the self-sufficiency of colonial and early American families, but as we’ll see, domestic textile production required cooperation not just within households but with larger networks of neighbors and communities. Household production was not separate from the broader economy but firmly embedded within it. In the next post, we will take a closer look at the process of making cloth through the experience of one woman who lived during the age of homespun.

Once again, I have relied mainly on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun for the material in this post.

The Age of Homespun

New-England Kitchen at the Brooklyn Sanitary
Commission Fair, 1864

If you read a lot about the Colonial Revival, you start to notice certain recurring symbols and themes. Perhaps the most persistent, and most interesting, is the spinning wheel, which for many Americans in the 19th and early 20th century was the quintessential symbol of the bygone era that came to be known as the “age of homespun.” Beginning in the mid-19th century, spinning wheels started to appear everywhere—the New England Kitchens of the Civil War-era sanitary fairs; early historical exhibits like those at the Essex Institute in Salem and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield; the photographs of Wallace Nutting. The spinning wheel was both an obvious and immediately recognizable relic of the past, as well as a powerful emblem of virtues like thrift, piety, and industry.

Platt Ryder, Woman at Spinning Wheel,
ca. 1860

Minister and theologian Horace Bushnell coined the phrase “age of homespun” in 1851, in a speech he gave at the celebration of the centennial of Litchfield County, Connecticut. Bushnell encouraged his audience to look to the everyday lives of anonymous people as the source of the nation’s greatness: “It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village notables called Esquires, that mark the springs of our successes and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these.” But by the time Bushnell gave his speech, the age of mechanized textile production was well under way. Those women who still spun or wove did so by machine in the factories of Lowell, Lawrence, and other New England mill towns. “This transition from mother-and-daughter power to water-and-steam power,” said Bushnell, “brought with it a complete revolution of domestic life.”

Demonstration of spinning flax,
Alice T. Miner Museum, 1926

The spinning wheel and all that was associated with it, then, became a way for Americans to make sense of the dramatic changes that industrialization had brought about. To understand the significance of wheels, looms, and other paraphernalia of domestic textile production to collectors like Alice Miner, we must (to use an obvious metaphor) unravel various skeins. First, what did textile production in the 17th and 18th centuries actually look like? Then, how did 19th and 20th century antiquarians and collectors interpret the tools and products (particularly woven coverlets) of colonial women, and what do their choices about collection and display tell us? And finally, why did some Americans in the early 20th century feel that it was important to preserve or revive the arts of textile production?

These are some of the questions that I will try to answer over the coming months. Along the way, we will see some familiar faces, like Frank Gunsaulus, William Morris, and Jane Addams, and we will meet some new ones, like Martha Ballard, Anna Ernberg, and Eliza Calvert Hall. Who knows, I may even try to do some spinning myself!

Sources:

Christopher Monkhouse, “The Spinning Wheel as Artifact, Symbol, and Source of Design,” in Kenneth L. Ames, ed., Victorian Furniture (Victorian Society of America, 1982), 155-159.

Beverly Gordon, “Spinning Wheels, Samplers, and the Modern Priscilla: The Images and Paradoxes of Colonial Revival Needlework,” Winterthur Portfolio 33 (July 1998), 163-194.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (Knopf, 2001).

William H. Miner, Amateur Photographer

Horses at Heart’s Delight Farm pose for the camera

One of the highlights of the Heart’s Delight Farm Heritage Exhibit is the display of photographs of life and work on the farm ca. 1910. These beautiful photos, which bring Heart’s Delight Farm to life, are just some of the hundreds of photographs that exist of William Miner’s various enterprises. Professional photographers produced albums and booklets that documented the farm, Chazy Central Rural School, Physicians Hospital, the Alice, and the Kent Delord House; these were supplemented by informal snapshots taken by William and his friends. Not surprisingly, given his interest in new technology, William took up photography more or less as soon as it became accessible to the amateur. And, as I’ve recently learned, he had his work shown at one of the first major exhibits of amateur photography, the Eastman Photographic Exhibition held in January 1898 at the National Academy of Design in New York.

Kodak advertisement, 1889

Eastman Kodak was the largest producer of cameras and photographic accessories in the United States, and indeed the company that had made photography a popular pastime. In 1888 George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera, which came preloaded with a roll of film that produced 100 circular photos, 2.5 inches in diameter. Photography no longer required bulky cameras, glass plates, or darkroom apparatus. As the company’s famous slogan proclaimed, “You press the button—we do the rest.” Over the years, Eastman produced ever smaller, simpler, and less expensive cameras—the pocket Kodak in 1895; the Brownie in 1900. Naturally, the company was interested in promoting photography as a popular hobby, but the National Academy show aimed to prove that it was an art form as well.

A very bad digital version of a scan of a
microfilmed edition of Godey’s Magazine. 

William Miner’s photograph captured the Administration Building at the 1893 Chicago World‘s Fair at night, its electric lights ablaze and reflected in the lagoon below. He won a prize of $25.00 in the category of contact prints taken with a timed exposure. In an article in Godey’s Magazine on the show, author Marmaduke Humphrey said of William’s photo that “the light reflections on the water arouse suspicions that the plate has been doctored—or should we say artistically bettered—to prove the photographer’s control over his work.” As Humphrey quite bluntly stated, if you claimed that photography was not an art, “you do not know what you are talking about.” The photographer controlled composition and lighting; he “can select, omit, heighten, or diminish values, choose his own tones, give an individuality to his work, and accomplish almost any of the general effects of the arts that work in only one color.” In short, it is “a fine art.”

The extensive technical displays at the 1898 exhibition, which demonstrated the effects of various papers and developers on photographic prints, suggest that although Kodak made it easy for anyone to take snapshots, there were still plenty of people who were interested in exploring the finer points of photography. Like William Miner, they experimented with various ways of manipulating negatives and prints to get the artistic effects they sought. 

Electricity Building, showing competing
exhibits by Westinghouse and General Electric

The Columbian Exposition was the first world’s fair to make extensive use of electricity in its exhibits, and it was the place that many Americans got their first exposure to electricity in action. In addition to the thousands of electric light bulbs that illuminated the structures and grounds, there was an entire Electricity Building that exhibited motors, generators, transformers, and other equipment, along with examples of appliances that ran on electricity. 

The Chicago World’s Fair was also the first to use photography for promotional purposes. In addition to the images produced by official photographers Charles Arnold and William Henry Jackson, other entrepreneurs were licensed to publish their own photos of the fair. Add to that the many individual visitors who brought their own Kodaks, and the fair must have been one of the most thoroughly documented events in the world up to that point.

William Miner’s contribution to the Eastman exhibit, which brought together the World’s Fair, electricity, and photography, seems to perfectly embody the spirit of the 1890s. The way that it combines up-to-date technology with aesthetics is also typical of William Miner, who consistently strove to unite the useful and the beautiful.

For more on the Eastman Photographic Exhibition, see this article from The Photo-Beacon (March 1898), which includes some reproductions of photos in the show (though not William’s, unfortunately).

P.S. Did you know that if you are a resident of New York State you are eligible to obtain a New York Public Library card, and that with the card you can access many online databases? This how I found the article in Godey’s Magazine, which is in the American Periodicals (1740-1940) database.

Settles, Stoves, and Screens: Staying Warm before Central Heating

How did people keep warm before the development of central heating? I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the very cold winter we’ve been having here in the northeast, and I recently came across an article that sheds some light on the strategies people used. In “Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Place,” Kris De Decker explains that instead of trying to raise the temperature of the air in an entire room, “they used radiant heat sources that warmed only certain parts of a room, creating micro-climates of comfort. These people countered the large temperature differences with insulating furniture, such as hooded chairs and folding screens, and they made use of additional, personal heating sources that warmed specific body parts.”

People (and cat!) enjoy the warmth of a tile stove in this painting
from 1867 by German artist Albert Anker.

Most modern heating systems are based on the principle of convection—the heating of air. Older methods used conduction—heating through physical contact—or radiation, heating through electromagnetic waves. Conduction and radiation are both more efficient methods of heating, since they transfer heat directly to people, but they also have drawbacks.

This seat in the Alice’s collection (which also
converts to a table) would protect the sitter from drafts.

The Colonial Revival movement of the twentieth century romanticized the big open-hearth fireplaces of the eighteenth century, but as De Decker points out, fireplaces “are hugely inefficient, because most of the heat escapes through the chimney. They also suck in large amounts of cold air through cracks and gaps in the building envelope, which cools the air indoors and introduces strong drafts.” To counteract these issues and to compensate for the fact that fireplaces don’t heat a room evenly, people used a variety of contrivances to contain heat and create smaller zones of comfort.  High-backed settles and folding screens were two of the most common devices.

Brass bed warmer

When people had to leave these warm spaces, they used portable, personal heating devices to transfer warmth from place to place. Sleeping spaces were rarely heated, so bed curtains helped hold in heat, and bed warmers—metal pans on long handles that held hot embers—were used to take the chill off cold sheets before hopping in.

Foot warmers kept extremities warm and could be used while traveling in a carriage or in unheated spaces like churches. Foot warmers were generally made of wood and metal, and like bed warmers, they were filled with embers from the fireplace. A long skirt or robe also helped to trap heat from the foot stove and warm the lower body. Similar devices—along with hot bricks, stones, or even potatoes—were used to warm the hands. In the nineteenth century, ceramic hot water bottles and foot warmers became more common. Using hot water instead of coals was also much safer!

Early 19th-century foot stove

Stoneware “pig” foot warmer

De Decker suggests that by combining these older concepts of radiant and conductive heating with modern technology, we might be able to heat our houses in a way that uses less energy. In the meantime, what are you doing to keep warm this winter? Personally, I find that a dog makes an excellent foot warmer!