The magazine of history with notes and queries, Vol. II, No. 4, October 1905

by Various

HAND-LOOM WEAVING REVIVED

Seated on a thick oak plank, worn smooth and shiny by centuries of use as the seat of a hand loom, and with Mrs. Talbot seated on a similar plank in front of a second loom in the basement of his residence, No. 193 Power Street, Arnold G. Talbot, secretary of the Tockwotton Company, and well known in social circles of the East Side, has become a hand loom weaver. Side by side, with a light between them and another in each of the front corners of the little room, Mr. and Mrs. Talbot sit every week day evening and weave plain and pattern goods in silk, linen and cotton, on the looms and in the fashions of two centuries ago.

They do it partly for amusement and partly to satisfy an increasing demand for such goods as our grandmothers wove, among people with so much money that it is really doing them a service to separate them from some of it. They have what is probably the only hand loom establishment in this State, a practical exposition of the spread and possibilities of the modern arts and crafts movement. It is right in line with the present movement for hand work in wearing materials or house fabrics by those able to pay the necessarily increased cost.

In fact there are but few such establishments in this country. In the mountains of Kentucky hand weaving is still practiced, and the products of the mountaineers, handled through a semi-public institution, have a ready sale. In Massachusetts such goods are also selling. Mr. and Mrs. Talbot first thought of the possibilities of remunerative trade when they found a demand for hand weaving among friends who saw the results of their work of three hours every evening—from seven to ten o’clock—on the one loom with which they began work. Then they procured another loom in Johnston, the town from which the first one came, and set that up beside the one Mr. Talbot had bought as a curiosity. Now they have hired a Swede woman to come to work at the loom during the day. In Sweden all the girls are still taught in the country districts to operate a hand loom, and this woman has not been in this country long enough to forget what she was taught as a girl.

Mr. Talbot believes in old things. It is said by friends that there is nothing modern in his house except the present members of the family. He has one of the most strikingly beautiful mantels imaginable, taken from one of the old houses on South Main Street, in which the quality of the old town of Providence once lived, and his son and heir even sleeps in one of the trundle beds of song and story. So when a friend told him of the auction of goods of a collector of antiques in Johnston he went to the sale. No one else seemed to want the old hand loom there offered, so Mr. Talbot bought it, just for the sake of getting an unusual antique.

There must be many such looms in the garrets of the South County and other sections of the State, where they were shoved to one side half or three-quarters of a century ago, but few of them are set up and in working order as this one was. Mr. Talbot had the loom brought to his home and then started to put it together again. What he did not know about looms was vast and comprehensive, and Mrs. Talbot’s knowledge was equally vain. But together and with the help of a friend or two whose working idea of mechanics was as great as the Talbot willingness to learn, they finally had it set up in the room Mr. Talbot had used for his den. Then they went to work to learn how to run the thing.

Mr. Talbot has a wide acquaintance among mill men, and some of them volunteered to come to the Talbot home and show them how to read patterns, that they might reproduce old hand-loom designs. So they came, and were given some hand-made goods to read. One by one they confessed that, while they could read any machine-woven pattern, the difference in the methods of the machine and the hand looms was great enough to puzzle them. They could not read the patterns, that is, tell how they were woven—so many threads this way, so many that way, and the rest. They gave it up. Mrs. Talbot, who had a rare combination of gumption and energy, tackled the problem and puzzled it out. She picked up a little here and a little there, and was soon weaving, and weaving patterns, at that.

This was early last October. The first loom had no sooner been set up and started than Mr. and Mrs. Talbot found a new difficulty. The work was fascinating, the hours they had to give to it were few, and each wanted to use the loom at about the same time. So Mr. Talbot commissioned the man he had bought it from to find and buy another for them. The second one was found in Johnston, the town from which the first had come, and was set up beside the other. After that they peacefully wove every evening side by side.

They had to work everything out from the beginning. Their thread they bought, but they had to build a warping frame, after the old fashion, and warp and link the thread themselves, running four threads at a time, up and down the warping frame. It takes them about four hours to wind fifty yards of warp for forty-inch cloth. Warping the yarn is the most essential feature of the whole process, for if it is not done well, the yarn will not feed easily, and the weaving will be stopped.

Everything about the looms, except the operators and the harnesses, is old. The harnesses, which came with the looms, were of cord, and the new ones are superior. The reeds used in the looms are of split reed, and Mrs. Talbot considers them better than the modern ones of steel. The looms themselves are built of white oak, and as their history is known, Mr. Talbot is safe in the statement that they are each more than 200 years old. He has even procured the square and compasses with which they were built. One loom is used for plain weaving, the other one for pattern work.

Mr. and Mrs. Talbot have named it the Hearthside Loom, a charmingly descriptive name, and have already produced some very handsome patterns, some of them copies of old patterns of two centuries ago, some of them from Mrs. Talbot’s ideas, or from patterns made by Mr. Talbot for their original work. They have found a good demand for their products at prices ranging from $3 a yard for tabbie weaving—the straight up and down, plain weaving—to about $5 a yard for silk goods. In linen, which costs $2.50 a yard, they use all imported Irish linen, the American linen lacking the property of lasting, the oil having been extracted from it. Wool patterns and patterns in imported cloth are worth $6 a yard, with plain wool weaving forty or forty-five inches wide, at $4 a yard, and scrim curtains at $6 a pair.

A good woman weaver can weave about four yards of linen a day, or about five yards of wool a day, on such looms as these. The Hearthside Loom takes orders for pattern work on original patterns, and its work has already proved popular among people who are able to buy goods made to last. In addition to the two large looms, Mr. Talbot has a small ribbon loom that is even older than the larger ones, while the trade-mark of the establishment is a reproduction of a hand loom small enough to be held in one hand, and hardly bigger than a large shingle.

The room in which they are placed is a veritable curiosity shop. On the wall hangs the long crane from the old glebe house of St. John’s Church, torn down last year, with other iron fire pieces; at the hearth are old iron fire dogs; all along the rear wall hang other antiques. The house is filled with old and curious things, none older or more curious, however, than the looms forming the working machinery of the Hearthside Loom.

Journal, Providence.