Rural Economy in New England 359 



Connecticut, and their families, are mostly clothed in plain, decent, 

 homespun cloth. Their linens and woolens, are manufactured in 

 the family way; . . . ."^ In the statistical descriptions of 

 various towns we find such statements as this: "The people gener- 

 ally manufacture their woolen and linnen cloathsin their ownfamihes, 

 using all of their wool and most of their flax."^ if ^e could have 

 examined the wardrobes of the men and women of the rural towns 

 piece by piece, we should have found everything of household manu- 

 facture,^ with the exception of the few bits of Sunday finery, hard 

 earned and long-treasured, such as a beaver hat, shoe-buckles, or 

 a fancy waistcoat, a silk gown and a few ribbons. 



The best description of the dress of the country folk at the begin- 

 ning of the last century, which I have been able to find, is that con- 

 tained in a manuscript prepared by Governor Treadwell of Connecti- 

 cut, in the year 1802 or 1803. The governor lived in Farmington, 

 a town ten miles west of Hartford on the Farmington River. The 

 conditions of dress and life which he describes are of the period 

 1760-1770. He remarks that between that time and 1800 a con- 

 siderable change had taken place, owing to the increasing commerce 

 between the town and the outside world, via Hartford and the Con- 

 necticut River. Such a change had, however, not yet taken place 

 in towns less favorably situated, and for them the conditions de- 

 scribed still obtained. In fact, the homespun garb prevailed in some 

 districts for several decades after 1800. Rev. Horace Bushnell 

 said in 1851 to the people of Litchfield County, Connecticut: "You 

 have remembered the wheel and the loom. You have recalled the 

 fact that our Litchfield County people, down to a period compara- 

 tively recent, have been a people clad in homespun fabrics — not 

 wholly, or in all cases, but so generally that the exceptions may be 

 fairly disregarded. "'* 



Governor Treadwell wrote as follows: "Our ancestors here, of 

 both sexes, have, till of late, clad themselves in simple apparel, 

 suited to their moderate circumstances and agricultural state. The 



' Gazetteer, 1810, art. Connecticut. 



« Goodrich, Rev. Samuel. A Statistical Account of Ridgefield in the County 

 of Fairfield (Conn). MS. in the library of the Connecticut Historical Society 

 Hartford, Conn., p. 5. The date is uncertain. The manuscript was deposited 

 in the library in 1800; mtemal evidence indicates that it was written a few years 

 earlier. 



» Women's hats were at times of household manufacture. See Gallatin, Re- 

 port on Manufactures, p. 439. Also Earle, Home Life, pp. 259-261. 



* Age of Homespun, p. 372. 



