In old Narragansett; romances and realities

by Alice Morse Earle

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.