48 FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 



Yards. Value. 



Blended and unnamed cloths and stuffs mado 



in families 180,659 63,230 



Tow clothmade in families 21,721 6,516 



There were 33,068 looms, 413 carding machines, 

 427 fulling mills, and 26 cotton manufacturing 

 establishments. I am not aware that there was a 

 woolen manufactory in the state. 



Effect of Peace of 1815 on Product and Manufacture 

 of Wool. 



The Peace of Ghent, and the liberation of com- 

 merce which followed, exposed our infant manufac- 

 tures, and our wool growing, to the competition of the 

 world. The exhaustion and derangement of our 

 finances assisted in their overthrow. The revulsion 

 from war prices to peace prices, in almost every thing, 

 was enormous, and it carried bankruptcy into every 

 department of business, and mourning into every 

 neighborhood of the land. Our manufactories per- 

 ished. Merinos, which were valued at $1,000 a head 

 in 1809, sold for a dollar a head in 1815.* Specula- 

 ting holders ceased, of course, to take any interest in 

 them. Multitudes abandoned wool-growing alto- 

 gether. Careless owners no longer paid any atten- 

 tion to preserving purity of blood. But the " most 

 unkindest cut of all" that I ever heard of their re- 

 ceiving was the fear expressed, by an agricultural 

 writer of that period residing in one of our northeast- 



* The well-known G-. "W. Featherstonhaugh, one of our most active 

 agricultural improvers, and himself a breeder of Merinos, states ex- 

 pressly that he had seen such shjeep so sold. I have the same fact 

 from other reliable sources. (See Featherstonhaugh' s Letter to Stephen 

 Van Kensselaer, on Sheep Husbandry, &c., Memoirs of the N. Y. Board 

 of Agriculture, vol. ii, page 138). 



