Woolen mill

“ The new town of Dayton was booming in consequence of these investments. The flour mill proved a great success and with various changes of ownership is now one of the great mill properties of the country, but the woolen mill, from which so much was expected, did not prove a financial success and was closed in 1880. It is rather a curious fact that no one of the woolen enterprises in the Inland Empire has met with large success except that at Pendleton, Ore., the success of which has been so great that it is a puzzle that others have mainly failed. ”

“ Wool was almost worthless and there was plenty to keep a small mill going if we could only get the mill." Being interested in sheep himself Watt was anxious to make that industry profitable. He believed that the time had come when woolen goods on a considerable scale could be manufactured at a profit; that the cheapness of raw material would overbalance the high price of labor.
Watt had no personal knowledge of woolen mills but there were in Oregon, at the time, two millwrights who understood the subject and were anxious to be employed in such an enterprise. ”

“ About 100,000 yards of cloth, worth as many dollars, were produced in the county in 1808. After the war which followed came a season of depression of manufactures; the cessation of the unusual war demand and excessive importations from abroad were the principal causes.
At this period, when politics were carried into private affairs, as religion had been some hundred years before, each party must have its factory. Thus the Housatonic Woolen Mill of 1810 was offset a few years later by the Pittsfield Woolen and Cotton Company in Federalist hands. ”

“ So far as the manufacturers, or mills of various sorts, are concerned, there is one striking difference about the paper of woolen and worsted mills as against cotton mill notes which appear in the open market; cotton mill paper, except in the case of the strongest mills, usually bears the endorsement of the commission house which sells the mill’s product, but this is not as a rule the case with woolen and worsted mill paper. The reason is that a large number of the wool manufacturing establishments sell direct to wholesalers and jobbers, and have no close affiliation with a selling-house. ”

“ The river, which here falls 28 feet in half a mile, is crossed by two railroad and two other bridges and by a dam of granite, 900 feet long and forty feet high; canals on either bank conduct the water to the mills. The mills, some of which are among the largest in the world, manufacture cotton and woolen goods, cloth and paper; and engines, boilers, machinery, clothing, hats etc. are also produced here. The woolen goods industry is of first importance, employing more than 11,000 people in two mills, while a third mill, making both cotton and woolen goods, employs over 5,000. ”

“ Not being in a position to make a comprehensive inquiry into the efficiency of American mills in the woolen industry, the Tariff Board made a study of labor efficiency in the various process of wool manufacture in connection with output and wages paid. Almost invariably the mill paying higher wages per hour showed lower costs than its competitor with lower wages. ”

“ By 1880 the product of all our mills, employed in the manipulation of wool in any form, was stated at 6207,000,000, and the census of 1890 will show this product not far, if any, short of $350,000,000. Next to England the United States is to-day the largest wool manufacturing nation, and the people of the United States consume a much larger quantity of wool per capita than any other people. Indeed, the increasing capacity of our woolen mills barely keeps pace with the increasing consumption of our people. ”

“ Only people living in designated towns may make cloth to sell, to prevent the ruin of these towns by people taking up both agriculture and cloth-making outside these towns. No one making cloth for sale may have more than one woolen loom or else forfeit 20s. This to protect the weavers' ability to maintain themselves and their families from rich clothiers who keep many looms and employ journeymen and unskillful persons at low wages. No one owning a fulling mill may own a weaving loom. No weaver may own a fulling mill. ”

“ Each man was in charge of sixty threads. There were three hundred workmen. Lombe made a fortune of 120,000 pounds and was knighted and made an alderman of London. After his patent expired in 1732, his mill became the prototype for later cotton and wool spinning mills in the later 1700s. There were many woolen manufacture towns. Clothiers might employ up to three thousand workers. At these, the spinning was done by unskilled labor, especially women and children in villages and towns. Weaving, wool combing, and carding were skilled occupations. ”

“ He added that a portion of the ruins had been torn down to make room for an extension of the Athlone Woolen Mills, and perhaps they had the Sheela-na-gig there.
I had no faith in this suggestion, but for want of something better to do, I turned in at the office of the [281] mills, and was warmly welcomed by the manager, who invited me to inspect the place. It is an exceedingly rambling and haphazard structure, but it gives employment to hundreds of people, mostly girls and women, whose pale faces and drooping figures bore testimony to the wearing nature of the work. ”

“ A large part of those who settled in Cedar Rapids came from the east where manufacturing leads all other industries and it is but natural that they should embark in their new home in those lines with which they were familiar. The papers and records of the early days tell of a long line of enterprises that have come and gone. There were flour mills, woolen mills, implement works, engine factories, wagon factories, oil mills—the list is a long and interesting one to the delver into local history. ”

“ Just as a burning forest is a magnificent scene with a dismal sequel, so the saw-miller’s industry, though it finds a paradise and leaves a rubbish-yard, is, while it goes on, a picturesque business. Like many forms of destruction, it lends itself to the exertion of boldness, strength, and skill. The mill itself is probably too primitive to be exactly ugly, and the complicated machinery is interesting when in action, albeit its noises, which at a distance blend into a humming vibration, rise near at hand to tearing and rending, clattering and howling. ”

“ The great factor in the worsted industry to-day is the American Woolen Company, popularly known as the Woolen Trust, which was said to control sixty per cent. of the country’s output at the time of its formation in 1899, and can boast of the largest and best-equipped mills not only in the United States, but in the entire world. ”

“ Next to iron and steel the most important manufacturing industries are the textiles. Both woollens and cottons were manufactured in Canada in small quantities before Confederation. A small woollen mill was established at Coburg, Ontario, in 1846, and even earlier than this there were woollen mills in Nova Scotia which had made the province notable for their Halifax tweeds. In 1908, however, the woollen industry generally was not in a flourishing condition. ”

“ The wool industry dates back to prehistoric man. The patience, care, and skill involved in its manufacture have ever exercised a potent influence on civilization. It is, therefore, interesting and gratifying to note the intelligent eagerness of our first colonists for wool culture. It was quickly and proudly noted of towns and of individuals as a [188] proof of their rapid and substantial progress that they could carry on any of the steps of the cloth industry. Good Judge Sewall piously exulted when Brother Moody started a successful fulling-mill in Boston. ”

“ The statement of a railroad man in the New York Herald is valuable: "Mills for the weaving of the coarser cotton fabrics are now in successful operation in Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky and several of the Atlantic Coast States, all of which have been [Pg 152] built by native labor, mostly with local capital and are managed by Southern men." [205]
The Clifton Mill near Spartanburg, furnishes a fair example of the distribution of holdings of the capital stock of a larger enterprise. ”

“ Such were the beginnings of the great textile mills of New England. The scene today is vastly changed. Productivity has been multiplied by invention after invention, by the erection of mill after mill, and by the employment of thousands of hands in place of hundreds. Lowell as a textile center has long been surpassed by other cities. ”

“ In this neighborhood miners are earning from half a dollar to two dollars a day. There are several large quartz mills not far from here. Common labor is worth ten dollars a month.
September 17. Spent the day in botanizing, blacksmithing, and examining a grist mill. Grist mills, in the less settled parts of Tennessee and North Carolina, are remarkably simple affairs. A small stone, that a man might carry under his arm, is fastened to the vertical shaft of a little home-made, boyish-looking, back-action water-wheel, which, with a hopper and a box to receive the meal, is the whole affair. ”

“ The model mill of the State, and of the world, for the reduction of silver ore, is the new 60-stamp mill of the Consolidated Virginia Mining Company. In this mill is to be found all that is valuable in any mill, and much in the way of machinery that can be seen in no other works of the kind. ”

“ Many mills or worsted spinneries send their wools, either sorted or unsorted as they may desire, to a combing mill, where the wool is put into top at a lower price than that at which most spinneries can do their own combing. By means of the naphtha process a larger amount of top from a given amount of wool can be secured than by any other process, and in addition, a top in better condition for drawing and spinning. ”

“ We are so absorbed in the tumult of mass output that we scarcely realize the part played by the old mills in rearing the cornerstone of our vast industrial activity. The phrase, “horse power,” now geared to myriad millions of units, in all likelihood, began with the horse-operated grist mill. A horse provided the power. The creaking water wheels with their rhythmic splash, were the outposts of the hydroelectric age which has harnessed rivers and falls and wrought marvels of production the world over. ”

“ The village blacksmith was a most important and necessary person, and concessions were made and land given to induce blacksmiths to settle in the community.
Small manufactories were soon established on every considerable stream. The grist mill, the saw mill, the flax mill—these were important institutions. The spinning wheel was in every house, and the loom was set up in every neighborhood. It remained for our day to develop the immense manufactories situated near the large marts. ”

“ Let us turn from the sheep problem to the factory problem. What are the difficulties of the woollen industry? In the first place, as we have seen, there is no home supply of wool worth mentioning. Further, there is the intricacy of woollen manufacture. Cotton machinery has been brought to such a pitch of perfection for every operation and there are in existence so many technical manuals for every department of cotton manufacture that a certain standardisation of output is not difficult. The problem of woollen manufacture is much more complicated. ”

“ In regard to these first years of the large establishment of cotton mills in the South, it is common to hear the opinion that the big profits made attracted the energies of the people to mill building. ”

“ In the experiment of negro operatives the old factory was again opening up a vista to the South, for, as it was vainly pointed out to the negro population of Charleston, if the trial of colored operatives in the Vesta Mill had succeeded, plants all over the section would offer employment to negroes. [383] When this third effort to use the plant for a cotton mill came to nought, the machinery was moved to Gainesville, Georgia, and though the top of the new mill was carried away by a cyclone almost as soon as completed, the company is now doing well in its new location. ”

“ There seems to be a strange diversity of opinion as to the extent of the participation of machinery manufacturers in the financing of the mills. A mill man of Anderson, South Carolina, said that the machinery people have played a larger part than the commission houses in the establishment of Southern mills; that the machinery business was at a standstill in New England at the time of the great activity in mill building in the Southern States, and the machinery manufacturers began to look about for mills to equip. ”

“ The statement was made by the committee that, in spite of these superiorities of situation, the cotton mills in the South make less than the mills of New England because, in considerable measure, [Pg 216] of poor financing, particularly poor borrowing facilities; their credit is not good. [322]
Northern mills can borrow money frequently at 2 or 3 per cent. less than Southern mills even today, though the credit of the Southern manufacturies has steadily risen. It is true that New England mill paper will sell cheaper, almost invariably, than Southern mill paper. ”

“ This report shows us that the cotton mills at that time employed only 10,000 men, against 66,000 women and female children. In 1831 it was shown that in the garment factories of Boston, out of 17,000 employees, more than 13,000 were women, and in Lowell alone 32 cotton mills employed 5,685 women and only 862 men. The first complete cotton mill at Waltham employed 138 weavers, all of them women, and three young girls whose names have been remembered—Sallie Winters, Mary Healy and Hannah Borden—were the first persons to operate power looms in Fall River. ”