Various inventions, notably Lowell’s power loom in 1814, and Jenck’s ring spindle in 1830, made it possible for the New England manufacturer to compete with the skilled labor of England, and up to the time of the Civil War the industry made rapid strides. In 1831 795 establishments with 1,200,000 spindles used 77,800,000 pounds of cotton and manufactured $32,000,000 worth of goods. Thirty years later there were 1091 mills with 5,200,000 spindles using 422,700,000 pounds of cotton and making a product worth $115,700,000. At this time 570 of the mills were in New England, 340 in the Middle Atlantic States, 159 in the South, and 22 in the Western States. The New England mills, however, averaged twice as many spindles as the others, and Massachusetts and Rhode Island alone contained 48% of the total.
Civil War
Home industries at this time supplied most of the coarse drills and sheetings, while the fine goods were imported from England. There was a small export trade of coarse goods to Asia. The Civil War cut off the industrial centers from their raw material so that for five years no progress was made, and when normal life was resumed a new tendency towards concentration became manifest. From then on the number of plants decreased and the individual establishment grew larger, so that in 1880 there were fewer mills and four and one-half times as many spindles as twenty years before.
Rapid Industrial Rise of the South
While we shall discuss the geographical distribution of the industry in a later chapter, it is worthy of note here that the feature of the period beginning about 1880 and extending to the present time, was the gradual growth of the spinning and weaving industry in the South. The social and economic system in the Southern states before the abolition of slavery made those states entirely agrarian, but as soon as a recovery from the war was accomplished, manufacturing, and particularly cotton manufacturing, grew up surprisingly fast. A glance at the growth in spindlage in the United States from 1880 to 1923 will suffice to illustrate. Sixty per cent. of the increase since 1880 was in the South. The units represent millions of spindles.
| 1880 | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 | 1923 | Inc. 43 yrs. | |
| North | 10.1 | 12.6 | 14.5 | 17.4 | 19.9 | 9.8 |
| South | .5 | 1.7 | 4.5 | 11.2 | 16.3 | 15.8 |
2. Making Cotton Yarn
The Bale
Almost all cotton comes to the mill in standard compress bales of five hundred pounds gross. The cotton is condensed to about 22 pounds per cubic foot at the compress, wrapped in coarse jute bagging, and circled with iron hoops. For some time there has been a movement to improve the so-called square bale, or to replace it with a different form of packing. Sea Island cotton is frequently packed in a smaller round bale, and there is much to be said for this practice. What we are concerned with here, however, is that the mill receives the cotton in a compressed form which must be loosened before anything can be done with it.
The Bale-Breaker