In old Narragansett; romances and realities

by Alice Morse Earle

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: