48 FINE WOOL SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 
Yards. Value. 
Blended and unnamed cloths and stuffs made 
in families... 2... eee ee ee eee ..- 180,659 63,230 
Tow cloth made in families..............65 21,721 6,516 
There were 33,068 looms, 413 carding machines, 
427 falling mills, and 26 cotton manufacturing 
establishments. I am not aware that there was a 
woolen manufactory in the state. 
Effect of Peace of 1815 on Product and Manufacture 
of Wool. 
The Peace of Ghent, and the liberation of com- 
merce which followed, exposed our infant manufac- 
tures, and our wool growing, to the competition of the 
world. The exhaustion and derangement of our 
finances assisted in their overthrow. ‘The revulsion 
from war prices to peace prices, in almost every thing, 
was enormous, and it carried bankruptcy into every 
department of business, and mourning into every 
neighborhood of the land. Our manufactories per- 
ished. Merinos, which were valued at $1,000 a head 
in 1809, sold for a dollar a head in 1815.* Specula- 
ting holders ceased, of course, to take any interest in 
them. Multitudes abandoned wool-growing alto- 
gether. Careless owners no longer paid any atten- 
tion to preserving purity of blood. But the “ most 
unkindest cut of all” that I ever heard of their re- 
ceiving was the fear expressed, by an agricultural 
writer of that period residing in one of our northeast- 
* The well-known G. W. Featherstonhaugh, one of our most active 
agricultural improvers, and himself a breeder of Merinos, states ex- 
pressly that he had seen such sheep so sold. I have the same fact 
from other reliable sources. (See Featherstonhaugh’s Letter to Stephen 
Van Rensselaer, on Sheep Husbandry, &c., Memoirs of the N. Y. Board 
of Agriculture, vol. ii, page 138). 
