When spinning wheels weren’t mere decorations

Modern life poses a lot of problems, but finding clothes to wear usually isn’t one of them. Provided you’ve got the cash, of course.

These days, clothes can be bought at many grocery stores, at hardware stores, at sporting goods stores, at department stores, and, of course, at clothing stores.

But back in the 1820s and 1830s when settlers were just arriving here in Kendall County, stores were rare, and in any case, most pioneers didn’t have the money to purchase “store-bought” clothing. And while some may have had the money, the era’s cultural traditions militated against spending it on consumables like clothing that could be made at home.

In fact, many of the earliest settlers chose not even to buy cloth. Unlike today’s clothing bought off the rack at the local superstore, most of the pioneers’ dresses, work pants, shirts, and shoes were homemade.

Most early settlers made sure they brought along extra clothing when they made the trek west from their Eastern homes. But along with extra clothes, they also brought the tools they would need to replace worn-out clothing, realizing frontier life would be hard on clothes.

Some of the frontier-type hunter-settlers, such as Frederick Countryman who lived in the AuSable timber with his Native American wife En-do-ga, may have worn some deerskin clothing. But while fringed buckskin hunting shirts and moccasins are popular costumes for actors in TV shows and movies about the frontier, the facts are that everyone – Indians and frontiersmen alike – replaced skin clothing with cloth as soon as possible. Anyone who has ever worn a wet buckskin shirt or leggings can tell you exactly why–buckskin becomes slimy when wet, and positively agonizing when both wet and cold.

When the settlers arrived, one of the first crops they planted (sometimes before the first crop of corn) was flax to be used for making linen. Raising sheep was also a frontier necessity since wool was a clothing necessity in the days before Thinsulate.

Flax was a pioneer mainstay that, with much labor – mostly by pioneer women – was turned into linen thread, which could be woven into linen cloth and a variety of other basic materials. In the fall, flax plants were pulled out of the soil and the woody stalks were left on the ground to rot (sometimes this was called “retting”). Then during the winter months, the stalks were smashed with special tools that carried odd names such as the flax brake and the swingling knife (which was use for scutching).

The brittle plant debris was then cleared away and the remaining rough flax fibers were soaked in a water trough and then pounded with wooden mallets until they were soft and pliable. Sometimes the fibers were boiled in a strong lye or lime solution with wood ashes and then chilled with cold water. Then the fibers were drawn across the strong, sharp iron teeth of a tool called a hackle or hatchel to shred them. The shorter fibers – called tow (which were fluffy and white, and thus the term “towhead” to refer to a child with white curly hair) – were removed and put aside. The long fibers, after being combed several times through the hackle, were then taken to the small spinning wheel where they were twisted into strong linen thread.

The tow fibers could be spun into a coarser thread of larger diameter, but could also be used for gun wadding and as the pioneer equivalent of grease rags and padding.

Women wove linen thread into linen cloth, but they also used it as the warp for mixed-fiber cloth. A rough but hardy cloth called tow linen, used for towels, mattress ticking, men’s shirts and summer pants, and children’s and women’s dresses, could be made using a linen warp and a tow weft on the home loom. On the other hand, a wool warp and a linen weft produced sturdy “jean” material (sometimes called linsey-woolsey), from which today’s denim cloth is descended.

And speaking of wool, it was even more popular than linen (it was much easier to make). Various breeds of sheep were brought west by settlers to provide both meat and wool for yarn.

Also brought west were the tools to turn linen and wool into cloth. Spinning wheels and looms were both important pioneer possessions. Many early households brought pioneer women’s small linen wheels and large wool spinning wheels with them from the East, but any competent wheelwright could build a good spinning wheel for $2 to $5.

When it came to looms, most pioneers decided to bring only the metal parts and make the frame when they got to their new homes on the prairie. My great-great-grandparents did exactly that when they came in the early 1860s, and we still have the heavy oak loom (with its metal parts probably forged in eastern Pennsylvania). Those early looms were big, bulky affairs – the main uprights on my family’s loom measure about 4″ in thickness, 14″ in width, and about 6′ in height. They were put together just like the barns and houses of the era, with pegged mortise and tenon joints. Sometimes, after building a better frame house, the family would move the loom to their old log cabin, which became the “loom house.”

The work of making fabric and clothing was extremely labor-intensive, especially processing flax into linen. Nevertheless, pioneer women performed prodigious feats of labor – one woman, while doing all the other things a female Michigan pioneer did in 1835, also managed to weave 700 yards of woolen cloth for herself and her neighbors.

As soon as possible, and not surprisingly, water-powered mills automated those tasks, and when the first stores opened, clothing and yardgoods became their most popular products.

Sometimes, we’re accused of not realizing how good we have it these days. When it comes to the contents of our closets, that seems to be a fair criticism. And with recognizing March as Women’s History Month, not a bad time to recall how indispensable females were to the nation’s settlement.

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