The Community Connection

Clothing the family

- Rich Wood Out & About

During the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, clothing the family as well as providing fabric for such things as bed sheets, ticking, pillow cases, hand towels and table cloths was, as we would say, “labor intensive,” and no small undertakin­g to the already burdened farm wife.

Cotton does not grow this far north and in the early days cotton fabric might have been a luxury for the Pennsylvan­ia Dutch. Called “baam wolle,” literally “tree wool” in the dialect, cotton for spinning could be bought by the pound, and there is some evidence of its use on the early farmstead.

However, the primary fabrics of the early days in this area were linen and wool with sometimes a combinatio­n of the two called linsey-woolsey: a linen warp with a wool weft.

To start with a small flock of sheep and end with a piece of wool fabric was no small thing. The sheared wool handed to the women had to be picked clean of debris, washed, carded to straighten the fibers, and then spun into thread on a “wool wheel,” a large spinning wheel quite unlike the smaller flax wheels commonly associated with spinning. The weaver gave the woolen threads a loose weave because the finished cloth was next delivered to the fulling mill where mechanical agitation in a bath removed the greasy lanolin from the wool and also shrank the weave into its final tightness.

The “degreaser” in the bath was said to be “fuller’s earth”—a type of clay. However, this author doubts that this substance was available to the local Dutchmen. There is a record from around 1810 of a local fuller collecting wood ashes for his business. The alkali ash may have worked as a substitute for fuller’s earth.

But the universal fabric of the early days was linen, product of the flax plant. Flax culture was brought with the immigrants; and until about the Civil War era, it’s safe to say that every farmstead planted about a quarter acre of flax for each family member.

Requiring good, fertile ground, the quarter acre of flax could yield about one complete set of clothing for one person. However, the amount of work required to grow and process flax was prodigious.

Flax culture involved the whole family: men to prepare the ground, children to weed the field, break and hackle the dried stalks, and women to spin the fibers into thread.

Briefly, to make linen the field had to be prepared, the flax seed sown, the young flax field weeded by barefoot children, the mature flax stalks pulled by hand, seed thrashed and cleaned, the stalks bundled and seasoned (soaked and slightly rotted to soften the outer stem). After drying, the stems would be broken; and the long fibers lying along the stem were cleaned, straighten­ed, and finally spun into thread. The linen thread was then taken to the dyer or weaver. Weaving was a men’s skilled trade and not done at the farmstead. The weaver was paid cash or, more commonly, he kept about ten percent of the fiber for his fee.

So important was flax that wills often specified in detail the legacy of flax that the son inheriting the farm needed to provide to the widow. (Incidental­ly, in the Germanic culture it was the youngest son, not the eldest, who inherited the farm. The youngest son was then obligated to care for the aged parents). The widow was often left with part of an acre (half, quarter or eighth) which the inheritor had to sow and tend yearly. At times the wife was even given the right to select the seed in order to guarantee the best for her. Typical is a Union County will of 1822 which remembers the wife with the order: “She shall have yearly a quarter of flax land sown on my plantation and to be broken and swingled [prepared for spinning] by the person whom I shall give and bequeath my plantation.”

Many times the allotment of land for flax and other provisions was quite detailed as in the following 1820 will from then Lehigh County: “It is my will that the tenant of the plantation shall each and every year plant for the use of the widow one acre of Indian corn and one quarter of an acre of potatoes, and one quarter of an acre of flax, but the widow must find the seed of them, the tenant hauling home all the same, and the tenant must plow the land, and must put dung on the land and planting for the widow.” In the same county (then called Northampto­n County) in 1782 the son was expected to give his mother annually “one quarter flax land and half a quarter of Pottattoes land.”

So important also were the tools for processing flax that they are often detailed in wills. “One flax break” became the wife’s property on the basis of a Berks will in 1786. In 1804 in Lebanon County “Two hatchels… two flax breaks, two spinning Wheals” were given first to the daughter and then to the grandchild­ren. In Lancaster County in that same year the widow inherited two spinning wheels, reel, yarn and weaving utensils.

The fact that flax land and flax processing tools were so frequently bequeathed is an indication of the importance of homespun cloth in the early days.

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