112 



a few for woolen and cotton mills, is quite significant. Sugar and soft 

 maple furnished the bobbin and speeder material, and for quills sugar maple 

 and dogwood met the demand, the latter to only a limited extent on account 

 of its higher price. Bobbin material must be hard, tough, close grained, 

 with a texture that smooths easily, and must not rough up in turning. 



Paper birch is the species from which small thread spools are manu- 

 factured and Maine is the state where most of them are produced. Small 

 spools are turned from a single piece of wood but no factories in Pennsyl- 

 vania were found making them. The manufacture of large spools, the three- 

 pieced product, used in loom weaving, called for a considerable quantity 

 of lumber. The barrels, sometimes called middles, are made by a process 

 similar to that used in making bobbins and speeders and when in the 

 rough-turned form resemble them except the barrels are uniformly cylindrical. 

 Sugar and soft maple supplied the material for their making in Pennsyl- 

 vania, but in New England beech and the birches were also used. The 

 heads of these spools, which are cut circular, were entirely of yellow poplar 

 and are screwed on and glued to the barrel, which is threaded at each end. 



The most exacting demand for both dogwood and persimmon is for shuttle 

 manufacture. These woods possess a hard dense fiber, wear smooth by use, 

 do not rough up, and besides are heavy and strong. They are the favorite 

 domestic woods for this purpose. Shuttles for silk weaving are made to 

 only a limited extent of these woods. Foreign woods are also called on. 

 Boxwood, both the kind that comes from the Caspian Sea countries and 

 that shipped from the West Indies, was reported, and also small amounts 

 of sarbo and doncella. They are the highest priced woods that are shown 

 in the table. Formerly boxwood furnished nearly all the shuttle material 

 but when its price became*prohibitive dogwood took its place and proved a 

 practical and satisfactory substitute. Persimmon has in comparatively re- 

 cent years become prominent for shuttles, chiefly owing to the insufficient 

 supply of dogwood to meet the entire demand. Shuttles are made from 

 squares cut to the desired size called shuttle blocks and it is in this form 

 that the manufacturers in Pennsylvania purchase their raw material. From 

 the rough block to the finished shuttle there are twenty-two distinct opera- 

 tions. 



White oak appears in this industry for making picker sticks and in no other 

 state in which this article was reported was this wood used to any consider- 

 able extent. Hickory is the principal picker stick material and in Penn- 

 sylvania it supplied almost two-thirds of all wood demanded for this use. 

 Quill boards are made entirely of yellow poplar and loom frames of sugar 

 maple. 



Table 69. Shuttles, Spools, and Bobbins, year ending June, 1912. 



