It is hardly a secret that the processes of tanning and currying infuse the surrounding air with a symphony of odors—a circumstance that helps to explain why a tannery was generally located on the far edge of a town, and usually on the downwind side. As if hides and skins were themselves not fragrant enough, eighteenth-century tanners, curriers, and leather dressers made use at various stages or for special purposes of such delectable commodities as fish oil, sour beer, urine, barley mash, and the fermented dung of chickens, pigeons, and dogs.
Sketchily described, the procedures employed by the tanner and currier (separate crafts in England but often combined under one roof or in the same man in colonial America) were as follows:
1) Preparing the pelt included the removal of accumulated dirt and stable trash, removal of the hair and epidermis from the outer or grain side (except for furs), removal of shreds of flesh and adipose tissue from the inner side, and plumping up of the fibers of the remaining middle layer, or corium, to be more receptive to the tanning solution. The tanner accomplished all this by repeated washings, followed by a sequence of soaking in solutions of lime, and then by draining, and scraping. The scraping process, known as unhairing and fleshing, he did laboriously with a blunted knife, the pelt being stretched over a wooden horse or beam. He might repeat the liming, draining, and scraping if necessary, and he followed it up with more rinsing and scraping to remove most or all of the lime.
2) Tanning proper involved soaking the hide or skin in a series of tanning vats, each containing a stronger solution—called “ooze”—than the one before. Careful and complete tanning, a slow process, required from several weeks for a light skin to eighteen months for a heavy hide. During this period the hides or skins were many times “hauled and set,” that is, removed from the vat and piled beside it to drain for a time. The same sort of processing took place in tawing, except that alum rather than oak bark supplied the tanning agent.
3) Finishing included trimming, currying, and coloring (if called for) in whatever combination of processes was needed for the intended use of the finished leather. Readers with uneasy stomachs should be satisfied if some of these processes are here left undescribed, only named, to wit: trampling, scouring, blooming, slicking, stricking, shaving, stuffing, dubbing, boarding, graining, bruising, staking, waxing, blacking, sizing.
Altogether, William Pearson might have subjected a hide to as many as two hundred separate steps (repetitions included in the count) in its passage from the animal’s back until delivery as finished leather to a shoemaker, saddler, bookbinder, or other leather using craftsman. The total time consumed would have been anything from a few months for a lambskin, for example, to more than two years for a thick ox hide.
ALEXANDER CRAIG, SADDLER AND HARNESSMAKER
A craftsman who had financial resources large enough to buy a lot in Williamsburg and build a shop on it would seem to have been in business already at another location. Such may have been the case when Alexander Craig, just before midcentury, acquired a lot on the road out of Williamsburg to Yorktown—not far from where the tanyard would soon thereafter be established.
A saddler and harnessmaker, Craig was the town’s most successful leather craftsman, possibly its most successful craftsman in any line. He acquired a number of properties in and near the colonial capital city over the years from 1749 until his death in 1776. Among them were the tanyard and two choice lots on the main street near the Capitol. One of the latter may have become his shop location, and the other did become his residence. His eldest daughter, Judith, married John Minson Galt, the promising young physician and apothecary.
Two of Alexander Craig’s account books survive. They reveal that he carried on a thriving trade, kept several indentured servants and slaves, and employed at least three journeymen leatherworkers—although not all of these at the same time. He bought and sold skins and hides, did tanning and currying for himself and for others, purveyed leather to other craftsmen, made and sometimes mended shoes, and sold shoes that had been made in his own shop, imported from London, or possibly made in other colonial shops. A wide variety of other leather goods issued from his shop, including cushions for couches, for chairs, and even for billiard tables, sword belts, gun buckets, leather pipes for a fire engine, razor cases, cartridge boxes, trusses, and once a “strong Coller for a Bear.”