Spinning and Weaving
National Park Service
National Park Service
Like Homer’s Penelope, like the Biblical spinners and weavers, like their sisters at the wheel and loom in many times and places, women of the Great Smokies simultaneously fulfilled the need for sturdy cloth and a need for creating esthetic designs and pleasing patterns. Frances Goodrich, who spent four decades helping to preserve and honor the region’s handicrafts, wrote:
“Hardly any other subject arouses so much enthusiasm and interest in a circle of mountain women as does the subject of weaving and its kindred arts. This is true whether the participants in the talk are themselves weavers or only their kinsfolk. Such work has for generations taken the place of all other artistic expression, and everyone, at least in the days of which I am telling, knew something by experience or by watching the work or by hearsay and tradition, of this fine craft.
... In the younger women who were learning to weave and keeping at it, I could see the growth of character. A slack twisted person cannot make a success as a weaver of coverlets. Patience and perseverance are of the first necessity, and the exercise of these strengthen the fibers of the soul.... One who has had to do with hundreds of mountain girls ... has told me that never did she find one to be of weak and flabby character whose mother was a weaver: there was always something in the child to build on.”
Turning animal and vegetable fibers into cloth necessitated several steps. The fibers had to be washed and then carded, or straightened, with wire-toothed implements. Then the women combed the carded fibers and rolled them onto a rod called a distaff, hence the distaff side of the family. In the next step, Aunt Rhodie Abbott ([below]) stretches, twists, and winds the fibers with a spinning wheel in Cades Cove.
The women then dyed some of the yarn. In the last step, Becky Oakley ([left]) weaves the yarn into cloth on a loom. Then the women had to turn the cloth into clothes and other things.
In some places the Little River Lumber Company, and other logging firms, sent logs cascading down the mountain sides in intricately constructed chutes.
Little River Lumber Company