Narragansett Weavers

Narragansett Weavers by Alice Morse Earle

"Narragansett Weavers" by Alice Morse Earle is an essay documenting the survival of hand-weaving traditions in the Narragansett region of Rhode Island at a time when the craft had nearly vanished from the broader industrialized world. Earle opens by describing how hand-looms persisted in English towns until around 1840, when power-loom manufacturing and steam-spindle spinning effectively ended domestic weaving. In America, and especially in Narragansett, the tradition lasted considerably longer. Earle writes of finding a score of old looms still in working order in the region, used primarily for weaving rag carpets, though some had been adapted for producing silk-strip portières. The central figure of the essay is Martin Read, described as the prince of Narragansett weavers. Orphaned and apprenticed at age seven to a diaper-weaver, Read became a skilled craftsman and devoted churchman who served as parish clerk, led congregational singing, and is credited with introducing the chanting of the Venite in America. He taught his journeymen and apprentices to sing and whistle as they worked, a practice Earle traces to the broader tradition of weavers as singers, citing Shakespeare's Falstaff and noting that many Elizabethan weavers were Flemish Calvinist psalm-singers. Read wove coverlets, broadcloth, flannel, calamanco, duroy, durant, and crocus, and his legacy extended through generations of Narragansett craftsmen. Earle visits the last surviving old-time weaver of the region, a pale, white-haired man named Rose who lives near the site of Read's former home and who learned his trade from one of Read's apprentices. She describes climbing to his loom-loft, dim and fragrant with dried herbs, crowded with yarn beams, spinning wheels, and discarded implements, each freighted with family memory. The weaver's trade card lists rag carpets, bed coverlets, and hap-harlots, a term Earle traces to Holinshed's Chronicles of 1570, marveling that it remained in living use in Narragansett. His pattern book contains over fifty weaving designs with names such as chariot-wheels and church-windows, bachelors' fancy, devil's fancy, Perry's Victory, and Lady Washington's fancy. Earle reproduces a letter from Weaver Rose that provides detailed weaver's lore: wages, tools, reed-makers, shuttle-carvers, local craftsmen who built looms and spinning wheels, and the dense community of trades that supported the homespun industries. The letter also preserves fragments of local memory, including figures such as Slippery Eber Sherman, the widow who supported herself spinning for twenty-five cents a day, and the industrious Mahala Douglas. Rose himself descends from men who fought in the Swamp Fight, the Revolution, and the War of 1812, and from original purchasers of Narragansett land from the Indians, making him in Earle's view a representative of an authentically rooted American identity. Earle devotes considerable attention to the full domestic process behind weaving, tracing the path from the shearing of sheep through dyeing, carding, and spinning wool, and from flax-seed through more than twenty manipulations before thread reached the loom, and then through forty bleaching steps before linen was pronounced finished. She contrasts this household independence with the dependency created by industrial manufacture, and praises the Ruskinian ideal of dignified hand-labor over factory conditions. Earle also describes two vivid character types associated with Narragansett weaving. The first is the travelling weaver-preacher, an itinerant figure who combined his craft with fervent and sometimes eccentric religious practice, including one man who built a log pulpit in the woods and preached aloud through winter cold, his fist-thumps punctuating his prayers. The second is a woman weaver believed to be a witch, whose silence over her loom, uncanny output of cloth, mysterious refusal of food and drink, and peculiar habits generated sustained community unease and folklore. Earle recounts episodes of a bumble-bee said to fly from her mouth, of the loom running at night without a visible hand, and of her death alone in a cold house, discovered by a compassionate tailoress. The essay closes with a haunting image: the following summer, boys who entered the abandoned house found that the witch's straw mattress had sprouted through its ticking and grown green, as flourishing as the grass over her unmarked grave.

By Alice Morse Earle · First published 1902 · Genre: Social History, Local History, Industrial History · 5,934 words

First lines

During the first years of this century there could be found in every English town, village, and hamlet many hand-looms and many weavers who on these looms wove for their neighbors and for small cloth-jobbers strong homespun woollen stuffs, rag-carpets, woollen sheets, cotton and wool bed-spreads, flannels, coarse linen and tow, heavy cotton cloth and fine table and bed linen. These hand-looms lingered in use till about 1840. So universal was then the extinction of hand-weaving through the vast growth of power-loom manufacture and of spinning by steam-spindle, and so sudden and complete the destruction and vanishing of all the old-time implements and machines, that when, ten years ago, under the stimulus of Ruskin's fiery appeal for the revivifying of hand-spinning and hand-weaving, these household arts were again started in Westmoreland, but a single linen-loom could be found for the work.

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textile history · weaving · Rhode Island · Native American crafts · colonial America · traditional techniques · cultural heritage · indigenous peoples · handicrafts · historical documentation · Narragansett tribe · fiber arts

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