136 Industrial Experiments in Colonial America. 



In view of such a fall in values, it is not surprising that the 

 people should have been unable to buy much English clothing, 

 and that domestic manufacture in the household should have 

 increased. 



In the lumber districts of New Hampshire, the woolen man- 

 ufacture did not thrive so well as elsewhere, but Armstrong, 

 the collector of customs, wrote in 1720 that within three years 

 about five hundred Irish families had settled in and about the 

 province, and had put the inhabitants on improving the linen 

 cloth industry for shirting and sheeting. The woolen manu- 

 facture had gone on in the other colonies, he said, and the as- 

 semblies had encouraged the coming of artists to teach the 

 people to manufacture their own produce. This industry had 

 been brought to such perfection that thousands of pounds' 

 worth of stufifs and druggets were sold in the Boston shops. 

 " Since New England is capable of producing their own manu- 

 facture in woolen, linen, iron, copper, etc.," he adds, " they are 

 now fully bent that nothing shall divert them from it. I pre- 

 sume in a few years they will set up for themselves, independent 

 from England." There were more than 30,000 sheep, at this 

 time, on some of the Massachusetts islands,^ and the wool was 

 yearly transported to the several colonies to be manufactured, 

 in spite of the law against this practice. A letter from John 

 Iskyll, of the custom house in Boston, bears similar testi- 

 mony.- The country people in New York were still making a 

 little homespun of flax and wool, in 1746, " to supply them- 

 selves somewhat with necessities of clothing,"^ but they seem to 

 have bought from Massachusetts. In a cargo sent from Boston 

 to Albany, in 1756, were 200 homespun jackets.* A society was 

 formed in New York, in 1765, to encourage the home manu- 



cording to Bellomont, ;^iooo colonial currency=^7oo sterling; in 

 Andros's day ^750 colonial currency-=;^6oo sterling. B. T. New 

 Eng., H: 34, 43- 



^Cf. p. 129. 



^Mr. Armstrong to the Board of Trade, B. T. New Eng., X: 80. 



=*Docts. rel. to New York, Vol. VI, p. 511. 



^Weeden, p. 679. 



