In the loom-room of Weaver Rose a veritable atmosphere of the past still lingers. Everything appertaining to the manufacture of homespun materials may there be found. Wheels, skarnes, sleys, warping-bars, clock-reels, swifts, quilling-wheels, vast bales of yarns and thread—for he no longer spins his thread and yarn. There are piles of old and new bed coverlets woven in those fanciful geometric designs, which are just as the ancient Gauls wove them in the Bronze Age, and which formed a favorite bed-covering of our ancestors, and of country folk to-day. These coverlets the weaver calls by the good old English name of hap-harlot, a name now obsolete in England, which I have never seen used in text of later date than Holinshead's Survey of London, written four hundred years ago. His manuscript pattern-book is over a hundred years old, and has the rules for setting the harnesses. They bear many pretty and odd names, such as "Rosy Walk," "Baltimore Beauty," "Girl's Love," "Queen's Fancy," "Devil's Fancy," "Everybody's Beauty," "Four Snow Balls," "Five Snow Balls," "Bricks and Blocks," "Gardener's Note," "Green Vails," "Rose in Bloom," "Pansies and Roses in the Wilderness," "Flag-Work," "Royal Beauty," "Indian March," "Troy's Beauty," "Primrose and Diamonds," "Crown and Diamonds," "Jay's Fancy," "In Summer and Winter," "Boston Beauty," and "Indian War." One named "Bony Part's March" was very pretty, as was "Orange Peel," and "Orange Trees"; "Dog Tracks" was even checkerwork, "Blazing Star," a herring-bone design. "Perry's Victory" and "Lady Washington's Delight" show probably the date of their invention, and were handsome designs, while the "Whig Rose from Georgia," which had been given to the weaver by an old lady a hundred years old, had proved a poor and ugly thing. "Kapa's Diaper" was a complicated design which took "five harnesses" to make. "Rattlesnake's Trail," "Wheels of Fancy," "Chariot Wheels and Church Windows," and "Bachelor's Fancy" were all exceptionally fine designs.
Sometimes extremely elaborate patterns were woven in earlier days. An exquisitely woven coverlet as fine as linen sheeting, a corner of which is here shown, has an elaborate border of patriotic and Masonic emblems, patriotic inscriptions, and the name of the maker, a Red Hook, Hudson valley, dame of a century ago, who wove this beautiful bedspread as the crowning treasure of her bridal outfit. The "setting-up" of such a design as this is entirely beyond my skill as a weaver to explain or even comprehend. But it is evident that the border must have been woven by taking up a single warp-thread at a time, with a wire needle, not by passing a shuttle, as it is far too complicated and varied for any treadle-harness to be able to make a shed for a shuttle.
Hand-weaving in Weaver Rose's loom-room to-day is much simplified in many of its preparatory details by the employment of machine-made materials. The shuttles and spools are made by machinery; and more important still, both warp and weft is purchased ready-spun from mills. The warp is simply a stout cotton twine or coarse thread bought in balls or hanks; while various cheap mill-yarns or what is known as worsteds or coarse crewels are used as filling. These, of course, are cheap, but alas! are dyed with fleeting or garish aniline dyes. No new blue yarn can equal either in color or durability the old indigo-dyed, homespun, hard-twisted yarn made on a spinning-wheel. Germantown, early in the field in American wool manufacture, still supplies nearly all the yarn for his hand-looms.
The transition half a century or more ago from what Horace Bushnell called "mother and daughter power to water and steam power," was a complete revolution in domestic life, and indeed of social manners as well. When a people spin and weave and make their own dress, you have in this very fact the assurance that they are home-bred, home-living, home-loving people. You are sure, also, that the lives of the women are home-centred. The chief cause for women's intercourse with any of the outside world except neighborly acquaintance, her chief knowledge of trade and exchange, is in shopping, dressmaking, etc. These causes scarcely existed in country communities a century ago. The daughters who in our days of factories leave the farm for the cotton-mill, where they perform but one of the many operations in cloth manufacture, can never be as good home-makers or as helpful mates as the homespun girls of our grandmothers' days; nor can they be such co-workers in great public movements.
In the summer of 1775, when all the preparations for the War of the Revolution were in a most unsettled and depressing condition, especially the supplies for the Continental army, the Provincial Congress made a demand on the people for thirteen thousand warm coats to be ready for the soldiers by cold weather. There were no great contractors then as now to supply the cloth and make the garments, but by hundreds of hearthstones throughout the country wool-wheels and hand-looms were started eagerly at work, and the order was filled by the handiwork of patriotic American women. In the record book of some New England towns may still be found the lists of the coat-makers. In the inside of each coat was sewed the name of the town and the maker. Every soldier volunteering for eight months' service was given one of these homespun, home-made, all-wool coats as a bounty. So highly were these "Bounty Coats" prized, that the heirs of soldiers who were killed at Bunker Hill before receiving their coats were given a sum of money instead. The list of names of soldiers who then enlisted is known to this day as the "Coat Roll," and the names of the women who made the coats might form another roll of honor. The English sneeringly called Washington's army the "Homespuns." It was a truthful nickname, but there was deeper power in the title than the English scoffers knew.
The starting up of power-looms and the wonderful growth of woollen manufacture did not crowd out homespun as speedily in America as in England. When the poet Whittier set out from the Quaker farmhouse to go to Boston to seek his fortune, he wore a homespun suit every part of which, even the horn buttons, was of domestic manufacture. Many a man born since Whittier has grown to manhood clothed for every-day wear wholly with homespun; and many a boy is living who was sent to college dressed wholly in a "full-cloth" suit, with horn buttons or buttons made of discs of heavy leather.
During the Civil War spinning and weaving were revived arts in the Confederate cities; and, as ever in earlier days, proved a most valuable economic resource under restricted conditions. In the home of a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, an old, worm-eaten loom was found in a garret where it had lain since the embargo in 1812. It was set up in 1863, and plantation carpenters made many like it for neighbors and fellow-citizens. All women in the mountain districts knew how to use the loom, and taught weaving to many others, both white and black. A portion of the warp, which was cotton, was spun at home; more was bought from a cotton-factory. My friend sacrificed a great number of excellent wool-mattresses; this wool was spun into yarn and used for weft, and formed a most grateful and dignified addition to the varied, grotesque, and interesting makeshifts of the wardrobe of the Southern Confederacy.
Though weaving on hand-looms in our Northern and Middle states is practically extinct, save as to the weaving of rag carpets (and that only in few communities), in the South all is different. In all the mountain and remote regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and I doubt not in Alabama, both among the white and negro mountain-dwellers, hand-weaving is still a household art. The descendants of the Acadians in Louisiana still weave and wear homespun. The missions in the mountains encourage spinning and weaving; and it is pleasant to learn that many women not only pursue these handicrafts for their home use, but some secure a good living by hand-weaving, earning ten cents a yard in weaving rag carpets. The coverlet patterns resemble the ones already described. Names from Waynesville, North Carolina, are "Washington's Diamond Ring," "Nine Chariot Wheels"; from Pinehurst come "Flowery Vine," "Double Table," "Cat Track," "Snow Ball and Dew Drop," "Snake Shed," "Flowers in the Mountains." At Pinehurst the old settlers, of sturdy Scotch stock, all weave. They make cloth, all cotton; cloth of cotton warp and wool filling called drugget; dimity, a heavy cotton used for coverlets; a yarn jean which has wool warp and filling, and cotton jean which is cotton warp and wool filling; homespun is a heavy cloth, of cotton and wool mixed. All buy cotton warp or "chain," as they call it, ready-spun from the mills. This is known by the name of bunch-thread. These Pinehurst weavers still use home-made dyes. Cotton is dyed black with dye made by steeping the bark of the "Black Jack" or scrub-oak mixed with red maple bark. Wool is dyed black with a mixture of gall-berry leaves and sumac berries; for red they use a moss which they find growing on the rocks, and which may be the lichen Roccella tinctoria or dyer's-moss; also madder root, and sassafras bark. Yellow is dyed with laurel leaves, or "dye-flower," a yellow flower of the sunflower tribe; laurel leaves and "dye-flower" together made orange-red. Blue is obtained from the plentiful wild indigo; and for green, the cloth or yarn is first dyed blue with indigo, then boiled in a decoction of hickory bark and laurel leaves. A bright yellow is obtained from a clay which abounds in that neighborhood, probably like a red ferruginous limestone found in Tennessee, which gives a splendid, fast color; when the clay is baked and ground it gives a fine, artistic, dull red. Purple dye comes from cedar tops and lilac leaves; brown from an extract of walnut hulls.
The affectionate regard which all good workmen have for their tools and implements in handcrafts is found among these Southern weavers. One assures me that her love for her loom is as for a human companion. The machines are usually family heirlooms that have been owned for several generations, and are treasured like relics.