It Happened Here -- Carding and Fulling

(and Linen Mills, too)

It has been asserted that every self sufficient "rural town" in New York had at least one of these by 1800, or certainly by 1850.  But today if you asked New Yorkers--even rural New Yorkers what carding and fulling mills were, probably not one in twenty could tell you.

          Near the end of the Berne-Altamont Rd., Berne

 Mills were an early part of the American colonial experience. Mills took over some of the most tedious and laborious work in colonial times. Usually within two to ten years of a town's settlement water-or-wind-powered grist mills were grinding a community's grain and many communities soon built sawmills, as well, to turn rough squared timber into uniform planks for everything from house siding, roofing and flooring, to furniture, to ship hull planking, bulkheads and decks.

  3 years before Catskill was bought from the Indians
                         Catskill had its first mill

           Main St. Catskill, at the Hans Vosen Kill (creek)

Rte. 9W, N. of Saugerties, "the Sawmills

Undershot wheel in the wheelhouse of an old mill
(probably 19th Century) at the Sawyer kill

Rte 375 at Tannery Brook, Woodstock

 Before cotton became widely available in the colonial North, wool and linen were staple fabrics. Most farms in colonial New York had a few sheep and a ready supply of wool but there were several laborious steps to turning raw wool into wool fabric.  The first of these was carding--combing bunches of wool into a wide belt of wool with the fibres (hair) roughly aligned and much of the dirt, manure, thorns and twigs combed from it.  To do this, pairs of flat paddles with rows of sharp teeth were employed to hold and tease out the wool.  Carding mills were developed to do the same with rotating drums studded with teeth, and rollers, rotating at slightly different speeds to tease the wool into relatively clean wool strips.

For many years spinning and weaving remained hand (and foot-driven) processes.  With Englishman James Hargeaves 1767 spinning "Jenny"cotton fibers could be machine spun. Improved upon by Thomas High and Richard Arkwright spinning became a mill process. But the British government considered these innovations as something of a state secret forbidding the export of any textile machine or plans for one. Finally, in 1789 Englishman Samuel Slater, apprenticed on the Arkwright machine, memorized the plans of the machine and secretly sailed to America.  Partnering with an American merchant in Pawtucket, Rhode Island he built the first cotton spinning factory.*  Again, in England, Rev. Edmund Cartwright built the first power loom.  In 1811, American Francis Cabot Lowell, after visiting England, designed the first American power loom.  By the late 1830's modifications of these machines made woolen spinning and weaving widespread.

Woven wool cloth was both greasy and stiff. (The natural lanolin in sheep's skin made it so.) To make it usable, the cloth had to be soaked in a detergent and worked/ beaten.  Urine made a cheap, if unaesthetic, detergent and soaking in it was followed by a scrubbing in very hot, soapy water.  Before mechanized fulling mills, in the British Isles, wool cloth was "waulked" by parties of women. An early woodcut shows a party of Scots peasant women seated side by side with legs out stretched pounding woolen cloth with their heels, singing a "waulking song" to maintain a rhythmic tempo.  "Waulking" helped compact the fibres making the cloth soft but stronger and water resistant. Fuller's earth, a fine grained absorbent clay with detergent properties began replacing urine early in America and fulling mill wheels used heavy wooden hammers or pestles to thump the cloth. Oliver Evans** in 1795 developed mill machinery that mechanically advanced the cloth as well. 

The washed cloth was stretched over "tenter" frames on sunny hillsides and held in place on "tenterhooks" to dry and shrink evenly. 

 A last process involved raising the nap on the wool by brushing it with teasel seed pods. Teasel pods*** are covered with fine hooked barbs used to raise individual hairs from the yarn, tangling them together and making the fabric both stronger and "fuzzy".  At fulling mills teasels were attached to rotating drums and used to brush the wool cloth.

Rte 4 Schuylerville at Fish Creek

Linen, like wool is an ancient fabric and like wool required extensive preparation, beyond spinning and weaving. Linen is made from fibers in the flax plant. (Biologically, they are part of the Phloem, long capillary-like fibers that bring water and nutrients from the plant's roots.) These fibers, however, are bonded to both the plant's core and outer bark and must be broken down by "retting" (literally rotting) by laying the harvested flax on the field, subjecting it to heavy dews or rain, or submerging it in bundles in a pond or stream for several weeks. Once retted, the flax was dried out and the brittle core and epidermis broken up on a hand operated flax break.  The pieces were then beaten/combed out with a wooden flax knife. "Scrutchening"was an extremely tedious process that might yield 15 lbs. a day! Finally, the flax was combed/heckled by running it through a card of "heckels", sharp-toothed nails, that removed the smallest woody pieces and and bits of fibers, and separated and polished the long fibers before they were spun. It is easy to imagine how the machinery developed for carding and fulling could be adapted for flax preparation, even before machines took over spinning and weaving.




*A few years later, in 1793,  Eli Whitney invented the hand cranked "cotton gin" which mechanized the slow process of separating the tightly held cotton fibers from their seeds, making cotton raising profitable (and increasing the use of slaves, in the South.)

**see "It Happened Here--Welcome to a Tech Valley, 1830's Style"  3/24/14

***Teasel was introduced to the America in 1733 for fulling. Descendants of these plants can often be found growing on well drained sunny hillsides. 

References.  

 "Berne Carding and Fulling Mills".  www.albanyhilltowns.com/wikiBerne /index.php?title=Berne_Carding_and_Fulling_Mills 

"How Linen is Made --Deck Towel". www.decktowel.com/pages/how-linen-is-made-from-flax-to-fabric 
                           
Tunis, Edwin. Colonial Craftsmen and the Beginnings of American Industry. Cleveland, 1965.

             

Rte. 376, Augusta

Addenda--  Quite unexpectedly I came across this marker, southwest of Rome and Fort Stanwix.  The Treaty of 1768 gave George Croghan and his mentor, Sir William Johnson opportunity to complete several land deals and take possession of Iroquois land promised to Sir William. see my post of 2/5/14
"King of the (Indian) Traders"