Textile mill

“ While many parts of the machinery required for the equipment of our textile mills are still necessarily imported from England because not made, or less perfectly made, in the United States, our machine manufacturers have been advancing as rapidly in recent years as the textile mills themselves, and the time cannot now be far distant when every new mill built in America will be equipped throughout with American-made machinery. ”

“ Even the largest figures convey an inadequate idea of the relative importance of our textile mills in the industrial economy of the nation, for those mills supply the materials for a great group of subsidiary factory industries, such as the wholesale clothing manufacture, etc. When we aggregate these, and add to them the value of the products of the linen, jute, hemp, and bagging mills of the country, we find that the product of our textile mills is larger in value than that of any single line of related industries, iron and steel excepted. ”

“ OF MATERIALS, THE CORSET, AND THE CRINOLINE
The material question seems to have been answered in every country save England, where the initiative in manufacture is conspicuous by its absence, though we have through the centuries so successfully begged, borrowed, stolen, or acquired an expert knowledge of the various textile arts, that every manufactured fabric is now grist which may come from our mill. ”

“ As wealth increased the home loom and spinning-wheel were slowly supplanted by the mill and factory. The different textile manufacturers at length found that competition was so keen that it was necessary to adulterate, particularly any fabric that was popular. The classes of goods that are most adulterated are the expensive fabrics, those of wool and silk. There are such changes of fashion in dress at the present day that garments composed of materials formerly considered good enough are often thrown aside as old-fashioned when only half worn. ”

“ The prejudice against mill operatives, as shown by investigations [iv] in England, would otherwise have delayed the establishment of the factory in America; that is, the factory as controlled by a central power. With the attractions offered, it was natural that the women of New England should accept situations as weavers, spinners, etc., in the great textile works ”

“ If this were a bag of Australian, South American, or Cape wool, the fleeces would in all probability have been bagged according to grades, so that only the sorting operation would have to be performed by the merchant or the mill.
When the wool has been sorted it is put into bins, and may now be said to be ready for the first of the manufacturing processes for which it is destined. Sorting is sometimes done by the merchants, but more frequently by the manufacturers. ”

“ In contrast to the tendency towards unification in spinning and weaving is the ever-increasing segregation of the converting plants. The rise of the merchant-converter, the growing demand for a great variety of finishes, and the fact that converting is very much cheaper on a large scale, have all brought about an increasing tendency on the part of the mill to sell its cloth in the gray, or to have it finished on commission. ”

“ The average New England cotton mill contains about fifty thousand spindles, while the Southern mill runs about twenty-five thousand. The vast majority of mills do both spinning and weaving, although some Southern mills sell yarn and some Pennsylvania establishments do [Pg 50] nothing but weave. Of the entire number of spindles in the country, 83%, and of the looms 97%, are in mills which do both spinning and weaving. ”

“ Selling to mills, as opposed to selling M/B, is known as selling on merit. Mills usually begin to buy in September and fill about 60% of their year’s requirements by January. Those manufacturers who use the high grades usually buy earliest because of the limited crop from which they must obtain their share. Cotton is ordinarily shipped soon after purchase and stored not by the merchant but at the mill. ”

“ In 1790 in Bolton a cotton mill was turned by steam, and before the end of the century this motive power was adopted in a few other places in the county. Cotton–mills worked by horse and water power were now common enough in all the large towns where textile manufacture formed part of the trade carried on. This enormous increase in local textile manufacture led at once to a similar development of the manufacturing of machinery, the raising of coals, and of271 all other industries required to carry on the now staple trades. ”

“ The latter are a class of merchants of comparatively recent origin, having appeared first about 1880, since which time they have practically taken control of the finishing industry. They buy gray goods either direct from the mill, or through a broker or selling house, and have them finished according to whatever they think the requirements of the market are. Inasmuch as they pay on short credit and carry the goods during conversion, frequently selling on several months’ credit to jobbers and retailers, they perform an important part of the financing of the cloth. ”

“ Or he may sell futures to protect himself on cotton he has bought but has not yet covered by cloth contracts. Hedging by manufacturers, however, particularly in the North, is not a common practice, because the cloth market is not elastic enough to follow accurately in the wake of cotton prices, and also because the mill treasurer rarely wants to hedge cotton in his warehouse, preferring to rely on his own judgment in matters of purchase.
By the Grower
Occasionally a grower may find it to his advantage to hedge his crop. ”

“ Strength,—elasticity and tensile strength,—is again one of the mill’s prerequisites. The usual buyer’s test for fibre vitality is to compress a sample in the hand to see if it will return to its former shape. The importance of length is that it governs the fineness of the yarn to be spun, while grades affect the finish of the cloth. We shall see later that mills cannot buy mixed lots, but must have even-running grades of fixed staple. ”

“ In the South, textile mills started originally with the idea that proximity to the cotton fields was the great desideratum. It has been found that the question of proximity does not have much to do with their success. Freights on raw materials North are as low, or lower, than freights on the finished product, and in the North and West is where the finished product finds its largest market. ”

“ In most cases where direct selling is done, however, the goods are sold in the gray by the mill treasurer at the mill. This practice is common with those mills which make staple gray goods and which, when not sold ahead, are able to manufacture for stock against spot sales. A few Southern yarn mills also sell direct.
b.
Growth of the Selling House
The relation between the manufacturer and commercial banker or commission house is as old as the industry itself. ”

“ It is in the manufacture of textiles—including all materials used in the manufacturing of clothing—that human ingenuity is best illustrated.
The magnitude of the textile industry in the United States is evident when we consider that it gives employment to a round million of people, paying them nearly five hundred million dollars annually in wages and salaries, producing nearly one and three-quarters billion dollars in gross value each year, and giving a livelihood to at least three millions of our population.
Wool, cotton, flax, and silk have been used since early times. ”

“ It led to the establishment of spinning mills where hundreds of women found employment, while the yarn was still sent out among farmers' wives, to be woven on their hand-looms in their own homes. The earliest textile factories were all spinning mills. Weaving became a factory occupation only after the introduction of the power-loom, invented in 1785 by Cartwright, but not applied to practical use until 1814. In that year the first power-loom went into operation in Waltham, Mass., in the first real cotton factory that comprised all the processes of cotton manufacture. ”

“ Factories are, again, subdivided into textile and non-textile: they are textile if the machinery is employed in preparing, manufacturing or finishing cotton, wool, hair, silk, flax, hemp, jute, tow, China grass, cocoanut fibre or other like material either separately or mixed together, or mixed with any other material, or any fabric made thereof; all other factories are non-textile. ”

“ In the beginning of the eighteenth century the textile manufacturing of England was carried on by craftsmen dwelling in the rural districts, the master clothiers living in the greater towns, sending out wool to be spun into yarn which, returned to them prepared for the loom, was re-distributed among other hand workers in other cottages. ”

“ The silk trade had received new life from the flow of intelligent French workers, and the first modern factory with elaborate machinery was that set up for silk throwing by Lombe. Yet by far the larger number of the important textile inventions of the eighteenth century were either applied in the first instance to the cotton manufacture and transferred, sometimes after a lapse of many years, to the woollen, worsted, and other textile trades, or being invented for woollen trades, proved unsuccessful until applied to cotton. ”

“ When outside influences came in—commission and machinery men—new and difficult problems had to be faced. The factories were assuming the physical proportions which they were bound to assume, and which it was right they should assume, but they ran ahead of the development in the textile industry, and in the South of expertness of management, business resourcefulness and economic outlook. The spirit could not keep up with the flesh, and the mind lagged behind the body. ”

“ It seems hardly necessary to controvert, in the light of the spirit with which mills were built about 1880 and the demonstrated total newness of the hands to the processes and even the idea of textile manufacture, an opinion that not only did the ante-bellum mills serve as a starting point for the later great development, but domestic weaving had accustomed the people of the industry. ”

“ In the more highly-developed branches of the textile and metal trades the division of processes appears at first sight more sharply marked than to-day. The carder, spinner, weaver, fuller in the cloth trade worked in the several processes of converting raw wool into finished cloth, related to one another only by a series of middlemen who supplied them with the material required for their work and received it back with the impress of their labour attached, to hand it out once more to undergo the next process. ”

“ The industry is carried on in a great number of neighbouring townships, but the cloth is commonly finished or dressed in the city itself, this procedure differing from that of the wool manufacturers in Gloucestershire and the west of England, who carry out the entire process in one factory. Formerly much of the business between manufacturer and merchant was transacted in the cloth halls, which formed a kind of market, but merchants now order goods directly from the manufacturers. Artificial silk is important among the textile products. ”

“ Old woollen rags, rags of carpets, and all the dust from the carding and spinning in the wool and cotton factories of Northern France, with a small addition of cotton, are transformed here into cloth which flows from Vienne to all the big cities of France--20,000 yards of "shoddy" every day-to supply the ready-made clothing factories, Hand-weaving has evidently nothing to do in that industry, and in 1890 only 1,300 hand-looms were at work out of the 4,000 which were in motion in 1870. ”

“ Those who have sought to magnify to the largest [Pg 74] proportions the industrial activities of the old South have frequently failed to take account of the differences in organization which distinguished the ventures from those of post-bellum years. The textile industry could not be a movement in economic society so long as investment participation sprang from and ended with individual initiative. Until the widespread emergence of the joint-stock form, the mills could not embrace the generality of the community's resources. ”

“ It is evident that in most textile industries the power-loom supersedes the hand-loom, and the factory takes, or has taken already, the place of the cottage industry. Cottons, plain linen, and machine-made lace are now produced at such a low cost by machinery that hand-weaving evidently becomes an anachronism for the plainest descriptions of such goods. Consequently, though there were in France, in the year 1876, 328,300 hand-looms as against 121,340 power-looms, it may safely be taken that the number of the former has been considerably reduced within the next twenty years. ”

“ In the earlier period men came to cotton manufacturing, it would seem, by more normal channels than at the outset of the subsequent development. Like Michael Schenck they had foreign industrial habits and traditions back of them, and they set up mills in communities populated by Swiss, Scotch-Irish and Germans. Or like William Bates and probably the Hills, Shenden, Clark, Henry and the Weavers they came from the industrial atmosphere of New England, then particularly stimulated by the encouragements lent to textile manufacturing by the embargo laid on English goods in the War of 1812. ”

“ Manufacturing industries are giving shape to the industrial future of the country. The cotton-mills alone employ seventy thousand people and keep more than one million spindles busy. More than one million operatives are engaged in textile manufactures. Much of the cloth, both cotton and silk, is still woven on cottage looms. The cotton cloth is sold mainly in China and Korea; the surplus silk textiles find a ready market in the United States. The best straw matting used as a floor-covering is now made in Japan and constitutes a very important export. ”