40 SHEEP INDUSTRY OF THE UNITED STATES 



confined to the households, but weavers were established in various 

 towns ; much of the manufactured linsey-woolsey was made with linen 

 warp and wool weft, or filling. Homespun of wool for men's wear was 

 made at home and finished in the fulling-mills established in the towns 

 from an early date, as at Watertown in 1662, Andover in 1673, Ips 

 wich in 1675, Salem in 1675, and Newbury in 1687. A few years after 

 the latest date here recorded it was asserted that the country people 

 and planters had entered so far into making their own woolens that not 

 one in forty but wears his own carding, spinning, etc. Fulling-mills 

 for finishing in a rough way the hand- woven woolens were starting con- 

 stantly in the diiferent districts. The most complete manufacturing 

 establishment was that of John Cornish, of Boston, who had a fulling- 

 mill, two furnaces for dyeing wool, four looms, and all the necessary 

 accessories for combing and weaving. The inventory of his estate, 

 taken March 2, 1695-'96, showed considerable quantities of wool and 

 woolen stuffs of most every description and color, so varied, in fact, 

 that they give evidence that Cornish traded his manufactures for that 

 of others; tJie farmers or farmers' wives taking in raw wool or spun 

 worsted and exchanging it for yarn and cloth. Cornish was a worsted 

 comber and weaver, the pioneer of this industry in N'ew England. 



The manufacture increased, and while in 1689 not a twentieth part 

 of what the country needed or consumed as to woolen or linen clothing 

 was made in New England, thirty years saw that great strides had been 

 made, and not only had the colonists " fallen upon the woolen manu- 

 facture," but they had fallen upon the making of beaver hats. When 

 this startling fact reached the London company of hatters, that hats 

 were made in the land of furs, they remonstrated, and their craft was 

 protected by an act forbidding hats to be transported from one planta- 

 tion to another. In 1719 Samuel Shute, the royal governor of Massa- 

 chusetts, informed the English Government that in some parts of the 

 province "the inhabitants worked up their wool and flax, and made a 

 coarse clotli for their own use," and that there were hatters in the mar- 

 itime towns, upon which Parliament resolved "that erecting manufac- 

 tories in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence." 



There was a steady increase in this homespun manufacture, and the 

 quality of the article became much improved and was worn not only by 

 the farmers and those in the middle walks of life but also by the well- 

 to-do and opulent of the colony. Superior wool and cotton goods were 

 made and sold by John Palmer in Boston in 1746; and in 1749, at the 

 fourth anniversary of the "Boston Society for Promoting Industry and 

 Frugality," 300 "young female spinsters" spun at their wheels on Bos- 

 ton Common, and weavers were at their looms. Self dependence was 

 asserting itself, and not only was American wool used for American 

 clothes, but sheepskins were used. John Calef, of Charlestown, in 

 1747 made sheepskin breeches, "cloth colored for breeches very much 

 upon the red." In 1777, after the war of the Eevolution had com- 



