NARRAGANSETT WEAVERS
During the first years of this century there could be found in every English town, village, and hamlet many hand-looms and many weavers who on these looms wove for their neighbors and for small cloth-jobbers strong homespun woollen stuffs, rag-carpets, woollen sheets, cotton and wool bed-spreads, flannels, coarse linen and tow, heavy cotton cloth and fine table and bed linen. These hand-looms lingered in use till about 1840. So universal was then the extinction of hand-weaving through the vast growth of power-loom manufacture and of spinning by steam-spindle, and so sudden and complete the destruction and vanishing of all the old-time implements and machines, that when, ten years ago, under the stimulus of Ruskin’s fiery appeal for the revivifying of hand-spinning and hand-weaving, these household arts were again started in Westmoreland, but a single linen-loom could be found for the work.
In the American colonies hand-weaving was also a universal industrial art. In no part of the country has the industry lingered longer than in old Narragansett. In many old New England towns single hand-looms can be found, some in running order, and with owners capable of running them to make rag-carpets. Others are still standing, cobwebbed and dusty, in attic lofts, lean-to chambers, woodsheds, or barns, with no one to set the piece or fill the shuttles. In Narragansett I know a score of old looms in good running order, though, save in one instance, set only for weaving rag-carpets; in many cases the owners, who do not make weaving a trade, will not “start them up” for weaving less than a hundred yards of carpeting. This is a long strip for a room in a cottage or farm-house, so neighbors frequently join together in ordering these carpets, and in company send vast rolls of the filling, which is made of inch-wide strips of cloth of all colors and materials sewed in long strips. Within a few years these old hand-looms have been used for weaving rag-portières made of silk strips.
Weaving was a very respectable occupation. It is told that the regicide Judge Whalley lived to great old age in Narragansett—one hundred and three years—and earned his living by weaving. The son of the Congregational minister at Narragansett, Dr. Torrey, was a weaver. The province was full of weavers. Miss Hazard gives the names of many in her “College Tom.” With all the spinning-jennies for spinning a vast supply of thread and yarn, there were no power-looms in Narragansett till 1812. Hand-looms made up all the yarn and thread that were produced. The prince of Narragansett weavers was Martin Read. In 1761 he was baptized in St. Paul’s Church as “Martin Read, an adult, the Parish Clerk.” He was a devoted lover of the church and was sexton for many years. He led the singing, and it is said that under his leadership the Venite was first chanted in America. During the troubled and rector-less days of the Revolution, he helped the parish work along by reading morning-prayers and the funeral-service for the dead.
He was apprenticed, an orphan, at seven years of age to a diaper-weaver, and served till he was of age, with one term only of schooling; but he was ambitious and read eagerly instructive books, especially on weaving and kindred arts. He married the daughter of an Irish weaver, and soon had journeymen and apprentices, whom he taught to sing as they wove; and when they did not sing the men whistled the airs, and with singing and whistling the work speeded.
This singing at the loom was not a peculiarity of Martin Read’s. We know the exclamation of Falstaff: “I would I were a weaver, I could sing Psalms and all manner of songs.” Nares says weavers were generally good singers, and that as they sat at their work they practised part-singing. Many of the weavers in Queen Elizabeth’s day were Flemish Calvinists and therefore given to psalm-singing, hence Falstaff’s reference.
One weaver, named James Maxwell, wrote some “Weaver’s Meditations” in rhyme in 1756. The frontispiece of his book—his portrait at his loom—is thus inscribed:
“Lo, how ’twixt heaven and earth I swing,
And whilst the shuttle swiftly flies,
With cheerful heart I work and sing,
And envy none beneath the skies.”
Martin Read reared his family well, and in the Episcopal Church. His son, Rev. Dr. Read, preached for many years at Christ’s Church in Poughkeepsie. He wove coverlets, blankets, broadcloth, flannel, worsted, linen, tow-cloth, and calamanco. This last was a glossy woollen twilled fabric, sometimes woven in a pattern in the warp. James Fontaine, a Huguenot weaver, says it was made of a fine double-twisted worsted. It was much used for the nightgowns and banians worn by substantial citizens of the day, and for women’s winter-gowns.
Other goods made by Weaver Read were duroy, durant, and crocus, a coarse tow-stuff for servants’ wear. This word, crocus, still may be heard in Virginia, and perhaps elsewhere in the South, where it was more and longer used than in Narragansett.
Martin Read lived near the old church he so dearly loved, and a sightly spot it was for a home. Still standing beside the church foundation, the site where the church first stood, is the deserted house in which Martin Read lived and wove and whistled and sung. On the road near his home lives to-day the last of the old-time weavers, one who can weave woollen and linen stuffs. Hand-weaving is not with him an accidental industrial makeshift, but his every-day occupation and means of livelihood. He learned to weave from one of Martin Read’s apprentices.
His low, weather-beaten house, set in a close-walled garden, is one of the most picturesque in old Narragansett. We entered from a glory of midsummer sunlight into a cool, pale-green light which penetrated the rooms through the heavy shadows of the rugged old cedar-trees that overhung the roof and the ancient lilacs that pressed close to the windows.
There has ever been associated in my mind with the trade of weaving the pale and sickly appearance and bearing of many English mill weavers; and, though ever of country life, this Yankee weaver was no exception to the rule. His skin, of extreme delicacy, was pale, yet suffused at times with that semi-transparent flush which is seldom seen save on those whose life is wholly indoors. His hair and beard were long and white, and had evidently been light-brown before they were white; his bright blue eyes looked pleasantly and intelligently out from the wisps of white hair. His visible attire was a clean, but collarless, white shirt and a pair of blue overalls; his feet were bare. We mounted with him the narrow enclosed staircase to the loom-loft.
There was such a flood of color out of doors, the fields and trees were so green, the tangle of larkspurs in the garden was so blue, the sunbeams so radiant, that the attic seemed but a dull abiding-place for a summer’s day; but as the eye grew accustomed to the dimmer light and learned to avoid the piercing arrows of sunshine that burned in through the heart-shaped holes in the shutters and made every mote of wavering dust in their path a point of unbearable glitter, then the attic seemed quiet and peaceful, and its shadows were grateful; and even the bang, bang of the loom when it was started up was not a garish rattle. Heaps of gay woollen yarns lay under the eaves, and a roll or two of rag-carpeting and strips of worn-out bed-coverlets of various patterns were hung on the beams or piled in heaps. There were vast boxes of cotton twine; and many yarn-beams ready wound, and swifts and quilling-wheels and “scarnes,” many in number, thrust under the garret eaves. Among the discarded wool-wheels and flax-wheels heaped high in the corner—obsolete before their fellow, the hand-loom—I did not peer deep. Though neglected, they are jealously treasured, for “that was grandma’s foot-wheel,” and “Aunt Eunice used that wool-wheel sixty-two year,” showed that what seemed to me useless lumber was haloed with association and tradition. I have never seen or felt elsewhere any such picture, any such atmosphere of an industrial life that is forever past, as that old-time weaving. The dim half-light of the loom-room and the darker garret beyond; the ancient chairs that thrust out a broken arm, and tables that put forth a claw-foot from the shadows; the low buzzing of hornets that fluttered against the upper skylight or hung in dull clusters on the window-frame—hornets so dull, so feeble, so innocuous in their helplessness that they seemed the ancients of their day; the eerie clamor of swallows in the chimney; the pungent aroma of “dry, forgotten herbs,” that swayed in the summer wind from every rafter; and the weaver, pale and silent, laboriously weaving his slow-growing web with a patience of past ages of workers, a patience so foreign to our present high-pressure and double-speed rates that he seemed a century old, the very spirit of colonial, nay, of mediæval days.
There was a monotonous yet well-controlled precision in this weaver’s work that was most soothing, and that seems to be a characteristic influence of the homespun industries. It was felt by Wordsworth and voiced in his sonnet:
“Grief, thou hast lost an ever-ready friend
Now that the cottage spinning-wheel is mute.”
This precision in work is that of the skilled hand and thinking brain controlling the machine, not the vast power of steam relentlessly crowding the overworked body and dulled brain.
By this hand-weaving, as if to prove Ruskin’s glowing and inspiring assertions, this weaver earns an independent living in intelligent work, of reasonable hours, in a comfortable house, and in conditions favorable to health—a vast contrast to the overworked, unhealthy, poorly fed, stultified factory-worker. His business has so prospered of late that he has had a trade-card printed at the village printer’s like any other independent manufacturer. From it I learn that he weaves rag-carpets, bed-coverlets, and hap-harlots. Hap-harlots, forsooth! could anyone believe that obsolete word had been used since Holinshed’s day? He wrote in 1570, in his “Chronicles of England,” etc.:
“Our fathers have lien full oft upon straw pallets or rough mats, covered onlie with a sheet under coverlets made of dagswain or hap-harlots, and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster.”
Yet here have been Narragansett weavers weaving hap-harlots, and sleeping under hap-harlots, and speaking of hap-harlots as though three centuries ago were as yesterday. I presume they have made dagswains also, since there still exists bills of Narragansett shepherds for dagging sheep.
The old-time cotton and wool bed-spreads or coverlets, seen of old on every four-post bedstead, he now sells for portières and bathroom rugs, as well as for bed and couch spreads. They are woven in simple geometric patterns, just as in the times of the ancient Britons, when the wools of the weft were dyed with woad and broom. The patterns are nearly all over a century old. He has a worn pattern-book with bewildering rules for setting the heddles for over fifty designs. Quaint of name are the patterns: “chariot-wheels and church-windows,” is a bold, large design; “church-steps,” a simpler one; “bachelors’ fancy,” “devil’s fancy,” “five doves in a row,” “shooting-star,” “rising sun,” “rail fence,” “green veils,” offer little in their designs to give reason for their names. “Whig rose,” “Perry’s Victory,” and “Lady Washington’s fancy,” show an historical influence in naming. “Orange-peel” is simply a series of oblong hexagons honeycombed together. “All summer and all winter” was similar. “Bricks and blocks” is evenly checkered. “Capus diaper” is more a complicated design for weaving damask linen, taking five harnesses. Floral names are common, such as “Dutch tulip,” “rose in bloom,” “pansies in the wilderness,” “five snow-balls,” etc.
The loom on which this Narragansett weaver works might be six centuries old. You may see precisely similar ones pictured by Hogarth in the middle of the eighteenth century; and an older one still in the Campanile at Florence, by Giotto, in 1334.
These excerpts from a letter of Weaver Rose’s give some pleasant weaver’s lore, and are in the lucid, simple, and quaint English to be expected of a man who still weaves and talks of hap-harlots:
“My grandfather and grandmother Robert and Mary Northrup lived at what is now called Stuart Vale but then known as the Fish Pond, in a little hamlet of four houses, only one of which, my grandfather’s, is now standing. He owned a shore and fished in the spring and wove some at home and went out amongst the larger farmers working at his trade of weaving, whilst his wife carried on the weaving at home and had a number of apprentices. He learned his trade of weaving of Martin Read, the deacon of St. Paul’s Church, who lived a few rods from the church. He died in 1822, his wife lived till 1848. The spool I gave you was made by Langworthy Pierce, a veteran of the Revolution. It has the initials of his name. I send you now one of his shuttles used for weaving broadcloth, and a square of linen I have woven for you of a pattern of five harnesses called Browbey. The looms here in Narragansett were all made by local carpenters. Stephen Northrup made looms, and Freeborn Church made looms and spinning wheels. I have 2 of his make. Friend Earle! more money can be made by weaving than farming. I have wove 30 yards of rag carpet in one day at 10 cents a yard; or 23 cents a yard when I found the warp. There was a man here by the name of Eber Sherman, he called himself Slippery Eber. He died in the war of 1812; his widow worked at spinning for 25 cents per day and supported herself and one son well on that wage. One dollar and a half per week was regular wage for a woman’s work. It took a woman one week to weave a coverlet of 3 yards long and 2-1/2 yards wide. Mahala Douglas went out to work at one dollar and a half per week making butter and cheese, milking seven cows every week day and nine on Sunday. She died leaving a large Estate, several thousand dollars, which her Legatees had no trouble in spending in six weeks. My grandfather was one of eight children. One brother was Rev. William Northrup; Thurston Northrup, another brother, was a school-teacher and a weaver of coverlets and cloth. John Northrup was called Weaver John. He was a coverlet weaver. John Congdon was a maker of Weavers’ reeds or slays. I have 70 or 80 of his make in my house. I have a reed that my grandfather Northrup had made when he went to the Island of Rhode Island weaving Broadcloth. He received 50 cents per day pay. Good Cream Cheese was 3 cents a pound at the same time of the Embargo in the war of 1812. I have an Eight and Twenty slay with 29 Beer that cost one dollar, made by John Congdon 70 years ago, as good as when made. He lived in North Kingston.”
The word slay or sley, meaning a weavers’ reed, has not been used commonly in England for many years, and is contemporary with hap-harlot. A beer was a counting-off of forty warp-threads.
It may be seen by this letter how many classes of workmen were kept busily employed by these homespun industries; makers of looms, wheels, reeds, scarnes, raddles, temples, swifts, niddy-noddys, spools, and shuttles; and turners of warp-beams and cloth-beams. The proper shaping of a shuttle was as important as the shaping of a boat’s hull. When the shuttle was carefully whittled out, smoothed off with glass, lightly shod with steel, and marked by burnt-in letters with the maker’s initials, it was a proper piece of work, one for a craftsman to be distinctly proud of. Spools could be turned on a lathe but were marked by hand. No wonder our weaver loved his old worn-out rubbish; every piece had been made and used by his kinsfolk and neighbors, who had put into every spool, shuttle, and loom good, faithful hand-work; and, like the cloths he wove, they wore well.
Weaver Rose would be an unimpeachable candidate for many of our modern patriotic-hereditary societies. One great-great-grandfather held a commission under King George III., which the weaver still has. Others were members of the provincial assemblies. Two great-uncles were taken on board a Yankee privateer in the Revolution, carried to England to Dartmoor Prison, and never heard of afterward. The son of one of those patriots was captured in the War of 1812, and kept eight years at Dartmoor, while he was mourned in Narragansett as dead. He was then released, returned home, and held to his death an office under the government at Wickford, a Narragansett seaport. One great-uncle was starved to death in the prison-ship Jersey in the Revolution, and another lost his life in Newport during imprisonment by the British. Grandfather James Rose was with the famous Kingston Reds in the Battle of Rhode Island and other Revolutionary encounters; and the weaver’s father, William Rose, fought in the War of 1812. His great-great-grandfather Eldred killed the famous Indian warrior Hunewell, after that cruel Narragansett tragedy, the Swamp Fight. Hunewell was naked and covered with grease, but he was not slippery enough to escape the bitter Englishman, who had been fighting for days. This tragedy was at Silver Spring, about two miles from the weaver’s home. Another Indian chased Eldred, but without capturing him. The chase was long, and Eldred did not spend much time in looking backward, but he never forgot the Indian’s face; and some years later he met in Newport an Indian who was very smooth and friendly, but whom he at once recognized as his old-time enemy. The weaver thus grimly and laconically tells the sequel: “Grandfather got an awl and settled it in his forehead and finished him.” Great-grandmother Austin was one of sixteen children. Their names were Parvis, Picus, Piersus, Prisemus, Polybius, Lois, Lettice, Avis, Anstice, Eunice, Mary, John, Elizabeth, Ruth, Freelove. All lived to be three-score and ten, and one to be five-score and two years old.
I have dwelt somewhat at length on the sturdy fighting ancestry of this weaver, with a distinct sense of pleasure at the quality of his forebears. He is, in the best sense, a pure American, with not a drop of admixture of the blood from recent immigrations. Some of his ancestors were those who made the original Petaquamscut purchase from the Indians, and here he lives on the very land they purchased. It is such examples as this that give dignity to New England rural life, give us a sense of not being offensively new. In my genealogical researches in England I have not found such cases nearly as common as in New England. Surprise and even annoyance is shown in England at your expectation and hope to find descendants of the original owners occupying farm-houses and manors two hundred years old.
Had the weaving been the only portion of the work done in the farm-house it would seem an important addition to the round of domestic duties, but every step in the production of clothing was done at home, as expressed by Miss Hazard of her great-grandfather’s household in Narragansett: “From the shepherd who dagged the sheep, the wool-comber who combed the wool, the spinners who spun, the weavers who wove, all in regular order till the travelling tailor made the clothes up, and Thomas Hazard went to meeting in a suit made from wool of his own growing.” The “all-wool goods, yard wide,” which we so glibly purchase to-day meant to the Narragansett dame the work of months from the time the fleeces were given to her deft fingers. After dag-locks, bands, feltings, tarred locks, were skilfully cut out, the white locks were carefully tossed and separated, and tied in net bags with tallies, to be dyed. The homely saying, “dyed in the wool,” indicated a process of much skill. Indigo furnished the blue shades, madder and logwood the red. Sassafras, fustic, hickory, and oak bark furnished yellow and brown. It will be noted that the old-time dyes were all vegetable. After the dyeing mixed colors could be made by spreading in layers and carding them over and over again. In carding wool, the cards should be kept warm and the wool very slightly greased with rape-oil or “swines’-grease.” At last the wool was carded into light rolls and was ready for the wheel.
An old writer says, “The action of spinning must be learned by practice, not by relation.” The grace and beauty of wool-spinning, ever sung by the poets, need not be described. Stepping lightly backward and forward, with arms at times high in the air, now low at the side, often by the light only of the fire, the worker, no matter what her age, seemed the perfection of the grace of motion; and the beauty of the occupation makes the name of spinster (the only title by law of every single woman) a title of honor and dignity.
The preparation of flax was infinitely more tedious and more complicated. From the time the tender plant springs up, through pulling, spreading, drying, rippling, stacking, rotting, cleaning, braking, swingling, beetling, ruffling, hetchelling, spreading, and drawing, there are in all over twenty dexterous manipulations till the flax is ready for the wheel, the most skilful manipulation of all, and is wrapped round the spindle. Flax thread was spun on the small flax-wheel. “Lint on the wee wheel, woo’ on the muckle.” It was reeled into skeins on a clock-reel, which ticked when the requisite number had been wound, when the spinner stopped and tied the skein. A quaint old ballad has the refrain:
“And he kissed Mistress Polly when the clock-reel ticked.”
These knots of linen thread had to be bleached before they were woven. They were soaked in water for days, and constantly wrung out; they were washed again and again in the brook; they were “bucked” with ashes and hot water in a bucking-tub; they were seethed, soaked, rinsed, dried, and wound on bobbins and quills for the loom. In spite of all this bleaching, the linen web, when woven, would not be white, and it afterward went through twoscore more processes of bucking, possing, rinsing, drying, and grassing. In all, forty bleaching manipulations were necessary for “light linens.” Thus, at least, sixteen months had passed since the flax-seed had been sown, during which the good-wife had not “eaten the bread of idleness.”
With the passing of these old-time household arts of spinning and weaving, went also the household independence. Well timed was our struggle for freedom from British rule, when every man and wife on their own farm held everything necessary for life and comfort—food, shelter, fuel, illumination, clothing. What need had he or she to fear any king? It could not be such an independent revolt to-day; in the matter of clothing alone, no family could be independent of outside assistance.
The old-time preparatory work of the weaver is much simplified for this Narragansett weaver in modern times, by the use of machine-spun threads and yarns. The warp of these bed coverlets is of strong twine or thread, while the weft is of various woollen yarns or zephyrs or crewels, bought at mills. These latter are aniline-dyed, and in no artistic sense equal the old indigo, hickory, sassafras, or madder home-dyed wools of yore. These skeins of yarn are prepared for use by spreading them on a reel or swifts, and winding the yarn off on quills in a quilling-wheel, which is somewhat like a simplified spinning-wheel.
Besides these weavers who worked in their own homes, making their own wool into cloth to sell, or weaving the thread and yarn brought to them by their neighbors, there was a distinct class of travelling weavers, who went from house to house working for a few shillings a day and their “keep.” They often were quaint and curious characters; frequently what were known as “natural preachers;” that is, either mystic or fanatic souls who tried to supplement or supersede the religious teaching of the community by itinerant preaching. Such teachers and preachers have ever flourished in Narragansett since the day of Samuel Gorton and his associates.
One of these weaver-preachers, undismayed by the indifference and even the disapproval of his neighbors, built a rude log pulpit in the woods near his home and there communed aloud with God if not with man. The sound of his fervid prayers and invocations could be heard afar off by passers-by in the wood-lanes and roads, even in mid-winter; while the emphasizing thumps of his sturdy fist kept his blood as warm as his religion and startled the Narragansett squirrels and chipmunks who thriftily used the recesses of the weaver’s pulpit as a storage-place for nuts and acorns. There were few women weavers among them, especially for linen-weaving, which was hard work. Occasionally some sturdy woman, of masculine muscle and endurance, was a weaver.
One of these Narragansett women-weavers was a witch. She would sit for hours bending over her loom, silent, peering into it and not doing a single row. This angered the dames for whom she worked, but they said nothing, lest they get her ill-will. Suddenly she would sit up and start her treadle; bang! bang! would go her batten as fast as corn in a corn-popper; and at night, after she had gone home, when her piece was still set in the loom, the family would waken and hear the half-toned clapping of the loom, which someone was running softly to help the witch out in her stint, probably the old black man. So, behold! at the end of the week more cloth appeared on the cloth-beam, more linen was ready for bleaching, and more rolls of carpet were woven than could be turned out by any man-weaver in the province. So whether it was hitching up with the devil or not, she always had employment in plenty; and her fine linen table-cloths were in every bridal outfit, and her linen web used in many a shroud throughout Narragansett.
She never ate with the family of her employer as did every other worker in house or on farm, nor was it evident that she brought food with her. The minister suspected she ate nocake, which she could easily hide in her pockets. She never asked for water, nor cider, nor switchel, nor kill-devil, nor had anyone ever seen her drink. Debby Nichols once saw a bumble-bee fly buzz-buzz out of her mouth as she wove in the minister’s loom-loft. But the minister said it was only a hornet flying past her—the garret was full of them. But, sure enough, at that very hour Joe Spink fell from his horse on the old Pequot trail from Wickford and broke his leg. Joe said a big bumble-bee stung the horse on the nose and made him rear and plunge. Joe had had high words with the witch over some metheglin he had tried to buy from her the previous week, for she brewed as well as she wove. The minister said that if metheglin had been the only drink Joe ever bought he wouldn’t have fallen from his horse, and that it wasn’t the first bee Joe had had in his bonnet.
One day some careless darkies in a kitchen set on fire a hank of tow that was being hetchelled by the chimney-side. The sudden blaze extended to a row of freshly ironed sheets, then to a wool-wheel, and soon a dense smoke and darting flames filled the room. All ran out of the house, some for water, some for buckets, some for help, and no one thought of the witch in the loom-loft. The bang and rattle of her work made her ignorant of the noise and commotion below, and as the smoke entered the loft she thought, “But that chimney do smoke!” Finally a conviction of danger came to her and she made her way down the loft-ladder and through the entry with difficulty to the open air.
“Where’s the cat?” was her abrupt greeting to the shamefaced folk who began to apologize spasmodically for their neglect to alarm her. “I saw her an hour ago on the spare bed in the fore room”—and back into the house rushed the witch, to return in a few moments with Tabby safely in her arms. This act of course deserved scant praise. Everyone murmured that there was probably some good reason for doing it, that everyone knew witches and cats had close relations, that the house didn’t burn down anyway, and probably she knew it wasn’t going to.
One night a neighbor met her, breathing heavily, her hand at her side, hobbling haltingly homeward. He told his wife he guessed the witch was pretty sick. She told the minister’s wife that the witch was getting her deserts. The latter in turn told her husband, and during a ministerial visit the next day he discoursed profitably on the probable illness and the unsanctified life of that misguided woman. The minister sat long in the front room sipping sangaree, but the hard-working little tailoress in the kitchen overheard his moralizing and his story. And when goose and shears were laid aside, and her day’s work was over, she hurried through the winter gloaming, across the ice-crusts of three fields, to the witch’s door. No light shone from the window, either of evil or domestic significance; but the tailoress pulled the latch-string and pushed open the door, and by the light of her hand-lantern found the witch in the chilled house cold and dead.
The following August a band of wondering, marauding boys, with alternate hesitation and bravado, entered the tenantless house. The windows had all been broken by missiles thrown by witch-hating passers-by, and the spring rains and summer suns had freely entered the room. And lo! the witches bed, on which she died—a sack full of straw of mouse-barley, with occasional spikes of grain attached—had sprouted and grown through the coarse hempen bed-tick, and was as green and flourishing as the grass over her unmarked grave.