Category Archives: weavers

How sweet it is; honey and the Shakers

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In A Simple Murder, Lydia Farrell is a beekeeper or apiarist. The Shakers regularly used outside contractors for certain jobs and I thought it logical that a former Shaker, ejected from the community, might stay on, especially if she possessed a useable skill. Photographs of Shaker communities, obviously from later in their history, sometime show the recognizeable white hives.

Honey is the oldest known sweetener; cave paintings from 10,000 years ago show people collecting honey. Sugarcane was grown on the Indian subcontinent and became a trade item when someone discovered how to extract crystal sugar from the sugarcane juice. It traveled by the trade routes to the Middle East and from there the Crusaders took it home to Europe and the British Isles. Christopher Columbus is commonly named as the one who brought sugarcane to the New World. Sugarcane is another crop, like cotton, that had a tremendous impact on the United States. It was grown in the south and since it required tremendous amounts of labor for the cutting and processing it necessitated lots of slaves.

The Native Americans made and used maple syrup as a sweetener.

Sugar came in cones and each piece had to be chipped from the cone. Most people in the early United States used both maple syrup and honey for sweetening, especially on the frontier. Most of the Shaker communities kept bees both for their honey and the beewax for candles.

Since this was before the age of petroleum, paraffin was not known and tallow, a substance made from animal fat, was sometimes used for cheap candles instead of beeswax.

 

The wooly facts

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So, my last post concerned flax and linen. I forgot to mention that flax was also grown for its seed. The seeds produce an oil. I’ve never heard of that, you say. But you have, under the name linseed oil. Linseed oil has a long history of human use, right down to cleaning artists’s brushes.

The fibers for wool are shorter than for linen but still has to be aligned the same way. Usually that was done by carding. Some of the prints from this period show very little girls carding wool. The carded wool was then spun into yarn.

Linen was actually more commonly worn than wool; sheep were expensive and many households didn’t own the equipment with which to process the wool. Also, handling the flax and  the sheared wool took time and skill.

But what about cotton, you ask? Cotton, because of the seeds which need to be picked out of the cotton boll, is very labor intensive as well. Unlike linen and wool, it requires a hot climate. It is also a ‘heavy feeder’, and rapidly sucks the nutrients from the soil. So cotton was not commonly worn, especially by the middle and lower classes. Lawn, a very finely woven cotton, was a fashionable fabric during the Regency period and as expensive as silk. It was not until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that cotton became more economically feasible to produce. Because of the gin’s impact not only on cloth production but also on slavery (many many slaves were now required to grow cotton), I think a case could be made that the gin changed the world.

Cloth was consequently very valuable. Every piece of clothing was worn, by the average person anyway, until it was literally rags and then those scraps were used for other things like pieced quilts. The wealthy could purchase many changes of clothing and unlike today, when it is frequently difficult to tell who is wealthy and who is not by looking at them, in earlier times someone’s wealth and status was immediately apparent. Maybe that is why some people know crave the designer labels; it speaks to the trappings of wealth and status? What do you think?

Weaving Words

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I suspect most people never think about the origins of some of the most common metaphors in our language. Take, ‘Strike while the iron is hot’, a concept that predates Shakespeare and comes from blacksmithing (as least according to one theory). Well, weaving and spinning have given common words and phrases to the English language too, and I’ll bet most people never think of their origins or really understand what they mean.

Take ‘tow’ for example, as in tow-headed. After the flax is treated into linen fiber (more about that later) and the long fibers are removed for spinning, the short fibers that are left are known as tow. They are not blond as people think but a light grayish brown. They have to be further processed to make them useable and they were made into sacks and cords and clothing for slaves and the poor.

Flaxen, obviously from the flax plant, refers to light blond hair. Flax is a flowering plant that has been cultivated since the time of the Egyptians and processed into linen. Since that is a multi-step process that involves soaking the flax in water and beating it with specialized equipment before the linen fibers are extracted, I wonder how anyone figured it out.

We are no longer so familiar with the words for the equipment required to process the flax into linen cloth. Loom, of course, and warp (the fibers that form the skeleton of any cloth), weft (usually the crosswise threads) and shuttle we still know. But the break, heckler and scutching knife?

First the flax plants were soaked for several weeks, sometimes in a stream, sometimes in special trough dug for this purpose. When the stalks rotted, they were put into a brake or break and crushed to remove the outside stalks. Although there are some smaller breaks made for women, this process was usually done by men, and skilled men at that, as it was a heavy job. By the late eighteenth century some mills to help with this step had begun to spring up. Once the bark was removed the scutching knife, a long wooden blade, was used to beat the fibers against a board. Then the linen fibers were put through hecklers or hacklers, boards with metal prongs that helped straighten the threads. This step had to be done several times with hecklers of increasing fineness. All of this processing was done largely by men. After that the long linen fibers were ready to be spun by the household’s women

The men who were skilled at ‘dressing’ the fibers considered this a profession and during the winter went from household to household processing the fibers. Most households did not have the equipment, in fact many did not own a loom although all had spinning wheels. And that is plural, some wheels spun wool, some spun linen, some required the woman to walk back and forth with the yarn in her hands. The spinner controlled the tension.

Linen is a fiber with no give, unlike wool which has a little stretch to it. Linsey-woolsey was a cloth made with a wool warp and linen weft and offered some of the advantages of both fibers. And how, asks the practical minded woman, were these clothes laundered?

Well, usually only the underwear was laundered. There was a great controvery over which fiber to use, wool or linen. Linen won and it is a fiber that can stand hot water and ironing and grows softer with both wear and washing. So the practical housewife laundered primarily the underwear, termed ‘body linen’ in those days.

The Simple Life?

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As I struggle to negotiate the programs for blogging and all the other digital equipment we deal with, I thought how appealing the ‘good old days’ were.

But were they?

The Shakers strove for a simple life but the culture then was essentially agrarian. The women cooked, sewed, canned and performed all those thrify housewifely virtues. Since talking was frowned upon they were essentially alone even in the midst of a crowd. And although they were equal in influence to the Brethern, everyone had to give up sex. I think most of us would agree that that is a tough sacrifice.

Outside the Shaker communities, women were not important at all. Documents of the period show that they were referred to almost exclusively by their married name, if that. Some are listed simply as wife. Talk about loss of identity. Women, as helpmeet to husbands, was a concept taken very seriously. Although most boys were taught to read and ‘figure’, many girls were not. It wasn’t seen as necessary and besides, they were all very busy. No wonder so many of them died young.

The women who had jobs outside the home were usually women who helped husbands, fathers or sons in a business. Sometimes they continued after they were widowed but not always. Many of the wills from that time put women firmly under the control and care of the eldest son.

Weaving was one of the very few non-gender professions. The male weavers, like my character Will Rees, took their looms from house to house. Those who traveled the roads were called factors (I wonder if there is a connection to the word factory? I’ll have to research it). Weaving was an honored middle class profession. William Findlay, one of the first legislators from the Pittsburg, Pa area and a moderate voice during the Whiskey Rebellion, was a weaver.

Shakers and the Simple Life

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The Shakers formed in the middle of the 1700’s and moved to the United States in 1774. So, at the time of  “The Simple Murder” in 1795 they were already established and rapidly growing. During the mid- nineteenth century the Shakers numbered between 4,000 and 5,000 members living in 19 communities that stretched from Maine to Kentucky. Several of these remain as museums. The converted community in Hancock, Mass has  interpretive guides after the Williamsburg model:  www.hancockshakervillage.org. Today, there are still three living Shakers residing in the Sabbathday Lake community near Auburn, Maine.

The more formal name for the Shakers, which they gave themselves, was United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or the Believers for short, but they were called The Shaking Quakers for the dancing, singing and twirling in their services. They also called their Church the Millennium Church since they expected their Church to last a thousand years.

            From the very beginning women played a significant role in the formation and shape of the sect. Ann Lee, who joined in 1758, claimed revelations regarding the fall of Adam and Eve, and preached celibacy. She became a highly influential and revered leader, called Mother Ann by her followers.  Many of her admonitions became part of the Shaker canon.

               “Good spirits will not live where there is dirt.”

            “Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.”