Chapter II 

 The Teclmiqiies of Tanning 



"It is generally a manufacture by hand, 

 and not machinery." — Tench Coxe, 1812 



In a special report on the American leather industry nearly a 

 century after Coxe, George C. Houghton concluded that not until 

 about 1880 had tanners to any degree attempted to replace manual 

 labor with machinery; and, even worse, many refused to avail 

 themselves of the new methods proffered by the advent ot modern 

 chemistry and instead chose to follow the time-honored techniques 

 "handed down for generations from father to son." ■*'' Nowhere 

 are the reports of Coxe and Houghton more colorfully confirmed 

 than in J, Leander Bishop's picturesque view of American tanning 

 practice: 



The rude appointments of a tannery [wrote Bishop] . . . embraced a greater 

 or less number of oblong boxes or hogsheads sunk in the earth near a small 

 stream, and without cover or outlet below, to serve as vats and leeches. A 

 few similar boxes above ground for lime vats and pools, an open shed for a 

 beam house, and a circular trough fifteen feet in diameter, in which the 

 bark was crushed by alternate wooden and stone wheels, turned by two old 

 blind horses, at the rate of half a cord a day, completed in most cases the 

 arrangements of the tanyard.'' 



Here was the typical tannery visualized by Houghton — simple, 

 poorly equipped, and almost haphazard in arrangement. But 

 America's tanning industry, despite such testimony, was not 

 without progress. Change occurred, but it did so slowly and 

 without the fanfare associated with the cotton gin or the clipper 

 ship. Steam, for example, dramatic in its application to textile 

 machinery, land transport, and watercraft, came late to the leather 

 factory and, when it did, it was used most routinely "in grinding 

 bark, for softening foreign hides, and in giving motion to many 

 machines for washing, glazing and finishing leather"^** — in short, 

 steam was quite unspectacularly applied to old techniques and 

 not to new ones. Iron and steel were likewise of small consequence 

 to the tanner, and the prospect of rapid transport seemed unessen- 

 tial to a process that required up to two vears to transform raw 



^^ "Leather Tanned, Curried and Finished," in Twelfth Census, vol. 9, p. 704. 



3" Op. cit. vol. 1, p. 453. 



^*^ Great Exhibition . . . 18il .Reports by the Juries . . . , p. 388. 



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