Brigham Young

“ I once in a while see a genuine piece of linen, which will as well last six years as the most we buy will last six months, if it is not washed to death. This you know, if you have been accustomed to using tow cloth. In clearing out brush cutting down trees, logging, and all kinds of rough work, the one or two pairs of genuine tow trousers and a couple of tow frocks will last through a summer; but put on that heavy so-called linen you buy in the stores and do nothing but come into a pulpit, and before you have had it three months it is cut to pieces and entirely done. ”

“ We also wish you to raise flax and make linen cloth. We have as good workmen at this business as there are in the world. The American brethren do not generally know how to raise flax for making fine linen, but they can easily learn. Instead of sowing five pecks to the acre, sow five or more bushels, and you will raise flax as soft as silk; from such flax fibres can be hatcheled as fine as spinster's webs. Most of the linen we import is more than half cotton. The flax is put into machines and cut and torn to pieces ”

“ We should now make our own iron. We have already spent about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make iron here, but we have failed, not for want of ore or for want of skill. Where is the difficulty? There has not been union enough in the men who engaged in that work. After we had spent about one hundred thousand dollars, an ingenious man, named Peter Shirts, would have brought out the iron as good as ever was made, and that, too, by means of a small furnace of trifling cost ”