A PAPER READ BEFORE THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY BY JESSE FEWKES. THE history of the various industrial arts of New England, is a subject which comes within the scope and province of the Historical Society of this old manufacturing town. Ipswich, one of the old mother towns of New England, is also the mother of two industrial children, of which I propose to offer a few items of interest before this Honorable Society at this time. These two industries seem to have been born own sisters of the same family of the useful arts in our mother country England and were also twin children in Ipswich, during the decade from 1822 to 1832, when one, the finer and more beautiful, died a most unnatural and distressing death, and the other has grown more healthy, vigorous and prosperous, as the years have rolled on, up to the present day. These two textile children of Ipswich, are the Manufacture of Hosiery and the Weaving of fine Laces by Machinery. To understand the cause of this diversity of success in these two well projected, and well started schemes of labor, we must make a concise review of the origin and development of the machines connected therewith, and also give a sketch of that predecessor of the art of weaving fine cloths, the earlier art of spinning fine thread. SPINNING. There are pictures cut in flat relief upon some of the monuments and temples of ancient Egypt, more than four thousand years before the Christian era, which represent among other occupations of that early people, the spinning of thread and the weaving of cloth. There are also representations on the monuments of prehistoric Central America, of women operating with the primitive loom and spinning apparatus. Squier's Nicaragua, Vol. 1, has a representation (copied from an ancient Mexican manuscript) of a woman weaving, and also of another woman spinning. Ancient records in China carry back the art of spinning and weaving to an antiquity discredited by many modern historians. These useful arts are prehistoric; they date before any written history. About 550 B. C., Herodotus records, "Amasis the first plebeian King of Egypt, sent as a present to the Grecian temple at Lindus, a linen corslet of wonderful workmanship, each thread of which contained 300 filaments clearly to be distinguished. Figures were woven into the pattern of the linen and it was adorned with gold and cotton." Cotton was then a costly material lately introduced from India into Egypt and was used along with gold for the enrichment of the linen of this corslet. This is said to be the first historic reference to spinning and weaving; but there are in the Hebrew Bible references which may be older even than this. See Proverbs xxx, 19, Exodus XXXV, 25.* Spinning is alluded to by Homer. The implements of the spinners' art have been developed from a very simple and crude beginning. The first spinning implement was probably only a pebble stone taken from the ground, uncut and unfashioned in any way. The filament of wool or grass, or perhaps the inner bark of some fibrous plant or tree, was tied to it and twirled around with the hand, then doubled back, and by the returning whirl of the rock, was made into a double and twisted string fit for the bow of a hunter. Then came to the front the oldtime skillful inventor, some aboriginal Edison or Marconi, and improved this simple device by cutting a knob upon one end of the pebble for the con Exodus XXXV: 25," And all the women that were wise-hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue and of purple, and of scarlet and of fine linen." |