X 



Rural Economy in New England 273 



Shoemaking. 



Shoemaking was carried on by the village cobblers, either in 

 itinerant fashion, traveling from farm to farm, or as a handicraft 

 in their shops on the village street. Here they produced, either 

 from their own material or from that which was brought to them by 

 customers, goods to supply merely the demand of the local market. 

 A wider market seems first to have been furnished in any proportions 

 by the demand for ready-made shoes for the Continental army during 

 the Revolution. This demand was supplied principally by certain 

 towns in Massachusetts. As early as 1778 men's shoes for the whole- 

 sale trade were being made in Reading and in Braintree. In Lynn the 

 transition from the handicraft to the commission stage of the industry- 

 had taken place somewhat earlier. In 1795 President D wight found 

 200 master workmen employed there with 600 apprentices, carrying 

 on their trade in little shops beside their homes along the village street. 

 Their annual output was estimated at from 300,000 to 400,000 pairs 

 of women's and children's shoes which they sold in Boston, Salem 

 and other seaports.^ Some were destined for consumption in those 

 cities, but the larger part were shipped thence to the Southern states 

 and the West Indies. In Connecticut shoes were made for export 

 in Guilford, Durham, New Canaan and Woodstock.^ In none of 

 these towns did the population amount to 3,000 in 1810, except 

 in Ljmn and Guilford, and in both of these commercial and fishing 

 operations were partial causes of concentration. 



Woolen Cloth. 



The manufacture of woolen cloth in small factories had begun as 

 early as 1790 in southern New England, but up to 1810 the industry 

 had had a very slow growth. In addition to the high price of labor, 

 which hampered all attempts at manufacture at this period, there 

 were the added dijQ&culties of inexperience with the new spinning 

 machinery, lately imported from England, and the unsatisfactory 

 character of the supply of the domestic wool both in quantity and 

 quality. The new factories were situated for the most part in small 

 towns;' they employed but few hands and turned out an annual out- 



' Dwight, Travels, I. 422. 



2 These facts have been taken from the historical sketch of the boot and shoe 

 industry in the Census of 1900, Part III.,Vol. IX., p. 754 and from Hazard, Blanche 

 E., Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts Before 1875. 

 Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XXVII., pp. 236-262. 



»In Massachusetts such factories were established in Ipswich, 1792; in New- 

 bury, 1794; in Monson, 1800; m North Andover, 1802; in Derby, Conn., 1806; 

 and in Peacedale, R. I., in 1804. 



