 Okay, welcome to History Bites. How nice to have people come out in the rain. Good to see everyone. Today I just have a few announcements before we start our talk and want us to thank Cindy for setting up the room for us here at the Jones Library in the comforts of our larger space over here, also for better graphics. We appreciate that. And thanks to Amherst Media for taking this so that we can see it on air later on on the website. So today's speaker I'd like to introduce and I would be happy to have her here. She is Marjorie Sinichal and she is the mathematics and history of science and technology professor at Smith College. So how does science and technology fit into silk? Well, in fact, she spent ten years working on the famous Northampton Silk project and that was a fascinating series of events that happened over in our sister city across the Connecticut. And she has also had two books that she's written or co-wrote. One is Northampton Century of Silk and the other is American Silk, 1830 to 1930. So she's very well versed in this topic. She also has a couple of books and probably innumerable professional articles but we have other books of hers in her field of mathematics. Today we're happy to have her come and talk about 100 years of silk to give you Marjorie Sinichal. Triple little wires. Thank you so much and thank you all for coming. I know it's a busy day and a rainy day and I'm really pleased that you're here. And I don't want this to be a formal lecture. I'll talk and show you pictures but please interrupt the talk and say a thing, kind of make me ask questions. Anything you want as we go along. Let's make it as informal as we can. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the Silk of this century and interspersing it with some of the things that we did in the Silk project because part of what we were trying to do there was to recover this century-long history and part of recovering it is to live it. And living it for us meant making the machines that we could find the patents for that had been used in the old, early days. Raising silver during the whole bit as best we could. We didn't try to sell anything that we could create. You'll be able to see why that was a good idea to do that. Anyway, I'm afraid this is in terms of four questions which I know you've seen already and they may seem like they're totally unrelated. What did Emily Hitchens instead do in this spare time? Why did Sojourner Truth come to the valley and why did she leave? How did Florence Massachusetts give his name and what held the wing parts of early airplanes together and why we should care? And to my, really, I pose these questions because they astounded me as I went along this project that Silk is really the thread literally that links them together and they all have a lot to do, in fact, with Silk. So let's see what that sort of thing was. Oh, by the way, one thing. This is a wonderful quilt that Sally Dylan, who lives in Amherst here, made for a she's Silk artist. This is the history Silk, history quilt, and everything that I'm going to talk about shows up in here somewhere on this quilt. And we have it, I think it's still online as a click map so you can go online and see this quilt and click on any one of these and then the story that the little panel is about will come up. Any feedback, sorry, any. Let's see. One thing that's very curious. How many of you have ever spent any time looking at the Northampton City seal? Sure nobody. And I don't think anybody in Northampton has either, but if you do look at it, you notice a couple things. There's two women talking here and it says justice, education, and charity. But look at what's around on the side. And if you look closely, you see those are silk moths and mulberry. Mulberry leaves. These are the leaves here and the moths and then leaves and moths and they go around and then there's more than over here. And then if you look a little more closely, you see among all the other things, the towers and the church and so on the smoke tag. And this was the silk mills. So these are really in the city seal, unannounced, but they're there and they remind us, if you look closely, what the city was all about and what they see, what it is. So I want to remind you about the life cycle of the silver. You need to know it to understand how and why the silk industry here was so problematical and what the problems were and why they were so difficult. So it begins, let's say, you can begin anywhere you want to, but begin with the eggs. These are tiny little things about the size of sesame seeds. And then when they hatch, they hatch into little tiny worms. They're black. That little tiny worm crawls around and will eat only mulberry leaves. And there are some of a few other things that will eat, but that many mulberry leaves and mulberry trees and they have to be chopped fine. And there's a whole lot of folklore that goes with that. But anyway, there is one eating a mulberry leaf. And they eat and become huge compared to the original size. They just eat day and night and they become this big, hideous looking things. And when they get to be this big, they then go on to some twink if they can find one. And if a person is raising the silkworms, will provide them with things to climb on, to go up there. And what they do up here is they've been storing all this all the time in their stomach as a liquid. Liquid silk is what they turn it into. And they have a liquid gland, a gland for the stuff in their stomach. And they begin spinning it out through spinorats on the side of their head. So these are not ears over here. These are spinorats. And they wrap themselves up in a mile long filament of silk. And that's their cocoon. And when we see cocoons, they're really just a wrapped up moth, a wrapped up, not yet moth, wrapped up unfootworm. And while they're in the cocoon, they then rearrange themselves completely and turn into moths. And when they become a moth, this is the cycle of each other in school, but it's interesting to see what happens. When they get to the states that they're fully developed, they spit out an acid. And that acid cuts a hole in the cocoon and they can crawl out of there. And they come out. And here you have this beautiful thing. After all these thousands of years of raising silkworms, they're so overbred. They cannot fly. They can't do anything. They can't even eat. And all they can do is make lay eggs and die. So then the cycle begins again and round and around and around goes. And if you're interested in getting that silk and doing something with that silk, you want to interrupt this cycle. And so what you do, first of all, you don't let this life cycle go through, completely as it is around the circle cycle cycle. You cut it off at this point. You remove, you don't let it get to the moth state. When the silkworm has wrapped itself up into a cocoon, you want to get those cocoons. And you get those cocoons and then begins the fork. So harvesting the cocoons and then the next step you have to do is to stifle the developing worm because the worm is still in there turning into a moth. So they stifle it in the desert countries. They put it out in the sun and let the sun bathe them. Or here in New England, they would steam them. There are many debates. I mean, every step of this process is so fraught. And one of the big debates is, how do you steam them? In what? And the consensus on one side was that you should steam them in water and the other that you should use raw. And so back before they would fight you over what to steam them with, but they had to steam them. And then once you know that the silk worm is dead, then you can begin to try to extract the silk from the cocoon, the cocoon itself is extracted to pull it off. So that's the next step. So, oh, let's go back to ancient China. And this is, we, Sam and I visited there. This is a... I forgot what promise it... This is the cat mask. This is the cat mask gamble, yeah. And the reason is that the silk, the invention of silk and the discovery of what to do with silk is credited to a goddess from China who was sitting under a mulberry tree one day and a cocoon fell into her tea. And instead of screaming and running off, she looked at it and noticed it was beginning to unravel. So she began tugging on a little thread that she found in the cocoon and gradually realized she was pulling off silk or something. And so that's the legend. So she's the silk goddess and she is credited with domesticating the cat. And why would she do that? Because she needs good cats to eat the rats. And the rats love the silk cocoons. So the rats, if you store them with silk cocoons in your shed, they're likely to get eaten by rats. And so she got the cat, they got the cat to do it, and this is the cat mask gamble. And this became China's... This is how China made it into the world. Silk was its biggest, biggest, most famous commodity. And it was kept, it's a dark secret that nobody was allowed to know outside of China. This was a different secret, but the secret got out and the way that it got out was a prince in a neighboring country decided to marry a princess in China and persuaded her to put the silk cocoons and the whole bit in her headdress. And then she had... they had a glorious wedding and she had the whole thing on her head and they got married and then she brought silkworms and everything out of China and all the knowledge and that's how it spread. And it spread around the world and many, many countries became very wealthy from that. And that brings us up to King James who... well, let's go a little about that time. King James, when Thomas Harriet with Sir Walter Raleigh went exploring Virginia, he discovered we found silkworms fair and great as big as our ordinary walnuts. There's no doubt that if art be added, there will rise in great profit and time for the Virginians as they're done now to the Persians, Turks, Italians, and Spaniards. So he was any gone King James to build up an English silk Easter, which he had wanted to do for a long time but couldn't do it because it's too damp there. And you can't raise silkworms there. They get sick and die. So he had to find a colony where it was drying up, warming up, the climate was right, and so here's Harriet telling him that he's found in this Virginia. So King James went after that and he sent silkworms to his colony in Jamestown and Captain John Smith replied, there was an essay made to make silk and surely the worms prospered excelled well until the faster workmen felt sick during which time they were eating with rats. So there were no cats at Jamestown. But anyway, so King James did not give up and he had a book drawn up, written about how to raise silkworms and you can see from these pictures that's ridiculous. It's not what silkworms look like and so forth and so on. But anyway, he sent this instruction book to every household in the colony and threatened to punish people who didn't plant mulberry trees to feed their worms and the trouble that he had there was that the colonists were doing better raising tobacco and what King James was a ferocious anti-smoker and he felt that this was the worst, the worst punishment one could do to oneself was bad for your health, it was bad for everything and he tried to get people to stop smoking and he said, he pulled out the wisdom of the medicine of his day and he says you have to, you cannot smoke, it's bad for you because your lungs are cold and wet and your brain is hot and dry and people say that smoking then will balance your tumors but actually destroy your tumors because it doesn't go to your brain and all this kind of 17th century medicine he pulled out and argued against smoking but nevertheless as we know smoking went out and tobacco went out nevertheless all the colonists began developing silk and raising it at home may need to make their own bread and so it really continued all the way up through the revolution and even here it came to the valley and by the 1830s it was a college industry people made their own silk bread or they borrowed it at the store there was regular back and forth people knew how to do this and it wasn't great silk it wasn't silk on the par with turkey and with Spain and so on but it was usable and they did this and it turns out I didn't notice until today that Amherst History Museum next door has some, made here in the valley in the 1830s at what was his name? Timothy Smith Farm and here it is and you can come up and look at it later it's really quite nice it's a whole hand that's saving the life of it thank you very much that's in the 1830s and there were prizes for it at the county fair and it went on and on like that until a young entrepreneur came to town Samuel Whitmarsh who had heard that the valley was doing well with elementary silk growing and he thought it was time to start a real industry up here not just doing it in your own kitchen and lining your own silk but to actually have a mill and do this thing on a bigger scale and get rich and sell it and he bought an old oil mill and a silk mill and in what's now Florence but that time was called Grossmeadow and that was about 1834 and that's a picture then from a historical book about this and he then wrote a book he traveled all over Europe looking at, seeing how people did things he wrote a book called Eight Years Observation Experience and Observation and the Culture of the Mulberry Tree and in the Care of the Silkworm which remarks adapted to the American system of producing raw silk for exportation Now what would be the American system? Well, he made that up It wasn't the American system It's what he meant by that really was you can forget about all the fussing details that these Europeans had Europeans had all kinds of rules for how you take care of the worms how you do this and that and that was learned by thousands of years of experience and Whitmarsh said don't need any of that just get the worms, feed them Mulberry trees, he also was in the mulberry business and people think he was real and that was really what he was doing selling mulberries and there became a great mulberry craze here that was equal to the two craze at home and Whitmarsh was getting everybody into this and he built his factory he fitted it out with these were lofts for where to put the silkworms and silkworms and so on but the American system just do it, don't worry about it that doesn't work and the reason it doesn't work is silkworms are extraordinarily finicky these creatures and they do get sick and a number of diseases is just leeching and also in these other countries this is from China it was part of life for a long, long time and they knew what they were doing and children you can see literally learned how to take care of worms on their mother's needs on their mother's lives here is someone who had these trays which are filled with mulberry leaves and little worms are on top of them eating and she's putting them up here to eat and then she'll feed them some more and meanwhile mother's having tea and the children wandering around and they learn this stuff by osmosis from birth and in the United States nobody knew any of this until they would get Whitmarsh's book and try to read it with one hand and do all this with the other hand after the worms got big enough then they had to unwind that's the next big step and here you have again China this is a woman sitting at a heated basin and the cocoons are in here this is mimicking when the silk goddess had one cocoon in her hot tea it's on a rabble here you have a big basin that's heated and then you put water in it and then you have the cocoons unraveling and you take them together and wind them up on a liner and that's how you get the silk off the cocoons and here again you have people watching over the fence they're all talking this is part of their lives and here they didn't have a clue and there were so many little details like when we let the silk worm eggs hatch and when you do this and how finally you chop up the leaves depends on how big the worm is that's the kind of thing Whitmarsh said this nonsense just paying more attention and get on with it and many people got into this this was a big big big deal around here and there was an organization called the New England Silk Growers Convention Association and Convention that in as much as in America and China the mulberry tree is found in the native forests it's a manifest indication of vine prominence that this country as well as China was designed to be a great silk grower country and who signed this but Edward J. Dickinson the father of Emily so that's my first question of what did he do in a spare time he was raising silkworms in the barn and I've come through her poetry to see if there's anything there about a worm I haven't found it but maybe you all know the poetry better than I do you found something in there but she must have grown up with this so she must know about it but anyway so they were all they were all into this and everybody was doing it and then Whitmarsh built the second mill but then the whole thing collapsed I think it was too much speculation mulberry trees and so on and the whole thing collapsed and so there was the mill with all the equipment in it and nothing happening and just at that time a group of abolitionists and utopian decided to form a society in the North Hampton area called North Hampton Association for Education and Industry and they needed a place to live and they needed a business and so they thought why not find this mill they actually lived on the upper floors of either business they thought they'd take it up they didn't really understand what they were getting into some of them had raised silk as children at home in Connecticut and other places but they didn't understand that manufacture was a whole different order but nevertheless that's what they did so they took on they paid off all the debts Samuel Hill who was a North Hampton resident paid off the debts he they formed the association they moved in and it was really So German Truth was a member of it and so were several many other prominent abolitionists and it was a wonderful thing it lasted five years but nevertheless all it did was pay us they believed in and practiced the quality of all races women and men and also children were allowed to vote but they didn't as far as I could but they could so it was quite an egalitarian place an interesting place and they all tried to do everything but they also raised the silk and that was their main product and what we know there's a lot that's known from all kinds of records and Christopher Clark has written several books on this society but one of the most interesting things we have is from the letters from a family the Stetson family Jay Stetson and Dolly Stetson who you see here in their older years joined the society in 1843 and he became the chief salesman for the silk he would be out on the road trying to sell the stuff that they had made and she was at home with three or four kids and home being at the association and she would write him letters every day and put it in the packages of silk that they would send him to set and then he would write back so these letters went from attic to attic and the Stetson family until 1998 they measured and then somebody found them and realized what they had and donated them to the store called Hampton and so Chris Clark and Kerry Buckley who was director of the store called Hampton at the time decided to edit them and publish them and then several of us got involved I wrote a chapter in there on the silk industry and how that worked and then someone else wrote about the black residents of the community and I think there was one more but anyway they're fascinating letters and the children were particularly involved in the silk manufacture because they had little hands and they could handle things well and so many of the interesting letters told about that and so what were they doing it's hard to imagine that they could have done this at all but they did it sort of they raised mulberry trees they raised the silkworms they unwound the cocoons and made skeins of raw silk and then they wound the skeins on bobbins and they twisted this silk into thread and they wound it onto skeins again and then they dyed it and each one of these was frog and then they all sent all this stuff off to the father, to James Stetson packaged and sampled products and advertising and sales and he went around trying to sell this stuff and he had a lot of competitors because they were not very many American competitors but they were importing silk from Italy and other places so he had to try to compete against let's say more professional silk and Almyra Stetson one of my favorite letters she writes to her father in 1845 that got the silk that they just produced and blue black dyed silk you can scarcely tell it from Italian and then she goes oh what a lie but they did try to push it off and many American silk companies groups of red growers used Italian sounding names so that people would be fooled into thinking that it was Italian and here's one of this Northampton silk project, this is raising the silkworms it's in the middle school here and then recreating the machines this is one for unwinding the cocoons you can see down here the cocoons are floating in this bucket that's heated you can't see the heating thing that's underneath and then they're putting it through the little holes here and winding it up onto makes stains here and you can see that this is silk that's been wound from here and this is a direct model, a copy of this we have found this in the fact that made this thing and this is a whiner to make things onto bobbins that was done here in 1838 and the original pattern model is this, it was in the Smithsonian they lent it to us for the silk project which was lovely so it came home for a year and then one of the students in the project actually dyed the silk with natural dye so we had so much fun and this is from the association's record books of the dye from the dyeing department and it's hard to read but there's ammonia in here and molasses and soda and vinegar these are old things that they put in there along with whatever colors they used to make the dye so anyway and the Stetson family also in addition to the letters had a case that they had kept of cocoons and these are some of the worms at different stages and the bottles here and then some of the silk that I guess James Stetson was selling and they kept this case they were there with the letters so that's also in the Stortford Hamptons and the local silk company later which I'll tell you about as we haven't got going they also made cases like that and here's a little one there's as much bigger but I brought it so you can kind of look at that the kind of thing, the silk and the different stages and the molasses and then the association broke up after five years and there were many reasons for it two of the reasons one is that they didn't do well with silk they didn't sell that it was a tag they knew it wouldn't and they had a lot of problems selling it and they had trouble with the worms and they had trouble with unwinding and they had trouble with the mulberry trees and you name it every trouble they could have they had but they also had all kinds of internal squalls and one thing that surprised me reading the letters was learning that people who I had thought were some way more heroes like Subjourner Truth and Sandy Hill actually were people I wouldn't really watch but they were rigid hard-lifers and so here you see Mr. Bassett this aside this is Dolly Stetson to James Stetson Mr. Bassett's I believe and commences packing up today I consider this a death blow to our association he goes now in consequences of things that were sent to him in a meeting holding at Samuel Hill's last Sunday this is her spelling Sojourner commenced upon Mr. May for leaving the children to play cards and Mr. Bassett defended him Mr. May loved children in the game Samuel Hill was a mathematical game Samuel Hill told me medical and then she had Sophia Ford and I think the worst play cards that you could read and so Bassett left and people were leaving this kind of thing Now Subjourner was and Samuel Hill were really buddies in this and they were extraordinarily rigid and I was surprised I mean there's one story in there that I forgot which one it was I think it was Hill there was a rural no piano actor he slammed the lid down on person's hands I mean a lot of my old piano teachers used to do but so they were they were being very fierce views and they were very rigid about them and some of the views we can think from great but some of them we may be rather than being pulled anyway so it was internal squabbles people leaving in a half gate angering each other happens with many utopian societies and this one broke up and that's when the silk industry really began in Northampton so up to now I sort of up to now and then he got going and what happened was that Samuel Hill the rigid kind of period decided to stay everybody else left they left the home wherever that was Connecticut, New York whatever he stayed here and designed a manufacturer's just thread he wasn't going to do and he wasn't going to use the Mill River anymore for power he was going to use steam and this was a new idea and no more silkworms he decided that you can buy the silk from Japan and then after what you buy from Japan you still have to twist you have to dye you have to do finishing on it you have to turn it into a real thread because the raw silk is just as it comes off the cocoon that's not ready to use for anything we'd be sewing nothing so it was the manufacturer of the raw silk into a reusable thread that he thought would be the thing to do and that's what he set up his mill for and not having to rely on the Mill River was a big help because as you know from Mill River it is clogged up in the fall with leaves it's frozen in the winter it's flooding in the spring and it's but there were 70 mills at one time on Mill River all were losing that for their power and he set up the steam mill and this is what he began and he called it the non attack silk now what he did that was special was he used a new device that he had a patent for although we don't know where he actually invented it but the patent was assigned to him for making a triple twisted thread so the thread that had been used most people had made him take two strands and twist them together but they untwist and he said if you have three strands they stay together better and that makes a stronger thread stronger because of three but it also holds together better and even in the Bible there is a phrase that says a three-fold cord is not quickly broken and I think he probably who he was took it from the Bible and the idea and he made this thread with a very simple machine which we made again and we were able to use and it really does work and that was what he did because this was just when the sewing machine was perfected perfected in the sense that Isaac Singer got patent for a model that really worked and didn't have the kinds of problems that earlier sewing machines have had and his machine worked well that everything except he had one problem and his one problem was he couldn't get any thread that would withstand the tensions that his machine put on it so if you've used the old Singer machine through this hole and this hole then it goes up and this loop and then the thing goes up and down and it's real tension, a lot of tension on the thread and for a thread as weak it would snap and all the thread that he could get snapped and Singer had made this triple thread triple thing that he thought hot and he went up to see him and he showed him gave him the spool and put it on his machine and it didn't snap he was thrilled and he said I'll show you the next slide I'll buy all you can make for me and so then he wrote checks for thousands of dollars he did it and he came home from that and told everybody the good news and decided that the town where they lived should be renamed Florence for the great silk import of Italy so they all agreed this was going to be another if you have Florence Italy and they renamed the town Florence and then there was a proposal to rename the river, the Mill River, the Arno and that one failed so anyway this is the triple you can see here the triple twisted and the sewing machine and that became Florence and we actually were able to find the checks cancel checks that Singer had written to him and this is only one of many they all stapled together and so that's what got this going here it was amazing and to me to think of those two guys together one of the most rigid fundamentalists and the others, as a singer had 10 different families I think not the few of them had been shut until the will was read so they would not have gotten along if they talked about anything but this but I think they just talked about silk here's a picture of the original appropriated in his company was the non-tuck and let's picture him a little older than he was in the previous one that's Daniel Hill and all these guys were formative of the mill or directors of the mill and this and that and the mills became big time and this is what they were in their heyday and this is the area that's still Florence and there's the river still and some of these mills are still there it's hard to tell which exactly was which and the annual product the valley to the product was zooming up with the silk so you can see the main mill river industries that in the turn of the 20th century were silk cutlery and metal products and wood products and silk was way far above the most lucrative of all of them so it really was making the whole valley like home this is one of the advertising cards that the company put out early on and it's so funny because they showed the worm and the leaf but they weren't raising the worms but anyway machine twists, game sewing twists the different kinds of things that they had embroidery thread, they were making lots of different things Florence's Knit Good silk underwear, silk blower, mittens all this kind of stuff was there actually a quartet celli involved or was that name used to make it sound Italian? Yeah, that's the question I was just about to answer If they made that up it means I found some of the interpretation of some of the beautiful silk or something like that they invented the name and they did it on purpose to make it sound Italian and there's still a quartet celli street in Florence they were all over the place but it was totally invented, it was just to make it sound Italian and then they became big time in this country, it became probably the biggest, I think it was the biggest silk thread manufacturer in the United States and these are some of their ads they had and a lady brought in it was you brought it, right? Yeah, fine brought, yeah some of the thread this is the quartet she had this is different kinds of thread this is a knitting thread although how everyone can get something so fine is hard to imagine and then different kinds of threads but they're all quartet celli thank you again for bringing it and they even made it to 42nd and 41st of Broadway, downtown New York with this up here the kitten was playing it was moving the image up here of the kitten playing with the thread and then here's a postcard that was made of it with the quartet celli silk 42nd of Broadway, this is 1912 this is an actual photograph that I found online and there's this little silk up there so it was as big as it could be at the time and they used it, it wasn't just for knitting sewing and things like that this is from the they merged, in the 20s they the quartet celli company or the nanotuck company merged with another one called Hemingway Velvet made silk cloth that go from not just thread but to thread and cloth together and they merged and called the quartet celli silk company so if the name was changed, they never did do the cloth but Hemingway the various uses made silk was really wonderful some of them were not generally known or given, insulating wires you can just glance, filaments were the same surgeon for tying arteries and sewing together cuts in the flesh and covered silk cloth with gum for adhesive and non-poisonous plasters and the dentist to clear between the teeth and tie the pellicle and filling and the book paper ties fancy little booklets and cards and the surveyor and the fisherman and adaptability of all these uses because of its great strength and durability so they were selling it for all kinds of purposes but the one that they most advertised were the threads that were used for sewing it for embroidery and so on and this was going strong but things were not going terribly well on the labor front that as they got bigger and bigger the workers got more and more unhappy with the way they were paid the way they were treated and it was a big strike this is from Gazette in 1923 and they eventually got dissolved but the the the clouds were on the horizon and you all know the Great Depression which was a few years later came and there were other things too that they were unaware of at the time first of all tensions with Japan got worse so getting the raw silk became more or more problematic and that ceased altogether before World War II that was one big problem another big problem was the invention of nylon and silk was doomed I mean why go to all this trouble with these when you can just make it in a lab and so that was already but they didn't see that coming so anyway they were shocked to death literally when things shut down and they shut down about 1930 everything collapsed not only the local companies here but also companies in America collapsed with the Great Depression and then they published this the last report the Silk Association it had hoped that the aviation industry would produce a new outlet for the manufacture of silk thread but laterally the wings of planes which at the start had been selling silk have been made very largely of metal and they could not foresee that there would be bigger planes even there was no way that this would work but that is what they were making depending on their hopes on it to bring in so this was the end and that was the end of the industry and the McCallums company here was making stockings and they continued to make those for a little longer but then they came in the nylon and through here they still kept it all together and they just gave up so that's the story and what's left of it in town there's only similar really there's Corticelli Street & Florence and then there's this mural in downtown North Hampton and if you look closely you see at the back there are women standing at machines these are winding stains onto bobbins or vice versa and so forth that's their representation in this and this is some of the things that we did in the North Hampton Silk Project it was huge exhibitions and symposium and research all over the place and lecture series and the quilt that's how we made and and we have a website it's all there and you can still see all of that now and then we had advisors this is Alexander who had been the head of the Albanian Silk Industry which is Albania was the only country in Europe the only communist country in Europe that was allied with China not with Russia this is for historical reasons that we don't have time to wind you but that meant that China got interested in the old Albanian Silk Industry kind of re-going there and he spent a lot of time back and forth with China and Albania and he at this point we had been and he was very nice he came over and he advised us on every step of the way and donated the first silkworm eggs to us so that we could get the project started and this is why Ida and here's Elaine I'm right here right here and I'm sorry I forgot her this is Fred and Fred is the one who had worked with the students to raise the silkworms and had to go find the mulberry leaves to feed them which meant going in wider and wider circles around the North Hampton looking for trees and cutting down branches at the end of the project he decided to retire but they're still raising the worms but for fun Laura is my business director at the historical camp and so I'll just conclude with a picture of the field again and thanking all the people who were involved in this and there's many more that I don't don't have written a list here but anyway this is very fun and I'm amazed at how many people are still interested out there in the world I get questions and things from people all over the world which I can't answer but at least they can take the trouble to write and thank you all for coming are there any questions? what about the Skinner silk mill that's a good question the Skinner silk mill was part of the complex on the mill wearer and this was in the period just before the non-truck really got going and the Skinner mills were there but all the local silk companies were concerned about the mill river irregularities especially the water flow and so on and so they constructed a dam so that the river would serve all of them better and they did this with very shiny engineer and they knew this was a problem but they were doing it on the cheap as little as possible to truck the dam and then one bright day there was a dam path and the whole valley was flooded and Skinner who had been one of the manufacturers there was totally wiped out he lost everything he did not lose everything so he'll keep going but Skinner was wiped out and then Holyoke invited him to come down there and rebuild his mill and the whole works there he did that and he rebuilt his house brick by brick I understand and Wisteria Hearst today was his house the recreation of his house had been up in this area and so then his mill they went just into cloth they didn't use the thread and so it wasn't any competition of the non-truck and that became one of the great silk companies too but it also ended at the same time maybe went on a little longer but thanks for asking about that because it's an important part of the history yes does the manufacturer still spread for just for showing in the name do you know anything about it no that's another thing Whit Marsh back in the early days did have a loo and he invited people to come out to see but apparently it was just a show and he wasn't really manufacturing and he was just showing trying to get people to invest in mulberry trees that he was selling so with Hill they didn't try to make cloth and Hill didn't either but there were other companies that did and so the building Hemingway which is the one that Hill merged with later and at that time they thought yes let's do that and there were some silk in this country there were silk cloth manufacturers but they were a little bit later so the book which I didn't bring with me that I did with two other people we each took a different mill and looked at them and this was the earliest one and the Haskell mills in the name were another one that came a little later and they made cloth and then there was I forgot the name of the other one in New York that was very fancy that was the Hyatt fashion but this here locally was all Fred essentially but they found a lot of uses for Fred and they were very creative marketers and people were having a good time doing all the knitting they had a whole series called whole needlework I think I was told once that one of the motivations to the silk industry in Florida was abolitionism the idea of undercutting cotton plantations that were slave run and is that another thing like Critichelli they just made it up to make it sound like that's true when the association took over Whitmarsh's business Whitmarsh didn't care about these things but they were of abolitionist and so when they wanted to have a business and had to be a business that met their ethical standards and so silk did because they felt that there was a future for textile but they didn't want to deal with cotton because they didn't want to deal with slave products so they felt that not realizing that silk was going to make slaves out of them they thought silk would be just the right thing that is ethically pure and also there were others who took that saying which is the Bronson Alcott's what was the name of that Bronson Alcott's to at least to be away from cotton they cried so far for a little bit not as seriously as this but for the same reason but it was considered really ethically pure textile kind of labor instead of slave labor they just didn't have a clue how difficult it was and all those little fussy things that the Europeans and the Turks and others in Chinese had developed over those years they were some of them probably unnecessary that you should catch the silkworms the day that you see the first star the sky and that the first goldberry comes out and all that should be done coordinated and you can probably be a little not so rigid about all those things but nevertheless they did have reasons for them and they had to be thought through and these people didn't think well thank you I was involved in that initial project with the curriculum development and I cannot tell you how rich the experience was meeting the gentleman who was heading up the silk industry to have that access to so much specialized information was just wonderful and we had such a good time the teachers involved had such a fabulous time so and I'm so happy to hear you speak again I'm sorry thank you thank you well you had a wonderful curriculum project there which like what happened to that well I think the main thing that went on was Fritz part of the project Fritz Morrison was a science teacher and so he took on the project of raising the worms as Michael said and he had that going on in his classroom and it was just a marvel now my aspect as an English teacher I never quite had the chance to carry that because of curriculum demands and all of that but there were so many rich stories that were potential to come out of that this whole session would have been great music for the schools but the pressures of every cast that we had would have put it somewhere but Fred made his part he had all those worms once and once all well one of my favorite stories is from the pre-industrial in the 1830s out of Munson where the person was writing about how annoyed he was at night where the electronics were raising so far from the parlor in his chambers above they're noisy and they're smelly too that was another problem that people couldn't stand to go in the barn because it was all smelly and then one of the kids said can they all die is that quilt available to view somewhere is it our house and you're welcome to come visit thank you let me just tell you a thing let me answer a question in the late 70s at the auction gallery it used to be 163 Hubbard's Hubbard's then Hubbard and Murphy they often had cabinets that must have been in department stores with the cordicelli beautiful drawing on the door and they held spools that must have been how you picked out the spool of thread that you wanted let's see if I can go back to it there this kind of thing these are big these are not little things they would be the size of a medicine cabinet people were buying them to put in their homes but smart enough to realize not to knock off the designs to put a mirror there they were beautifully made it was always hard wood there were no little spools of thread inside I was always looking for them it was just I clearly remembered the cordicelli and I thought there was a cordicelli factory in Florence I did not know the whole thing was made up I thought it was a factory I thought that's how Florence got its name I was wondering when people were doing it at home were they doing it to sell the raw silk or were they doing it for their own use I understand they did it for both they did it for their own use they could go to the store they could create a stage of silk for something else but they also used it for their own home so what they had to do was they had to unwind it and I did not explain you have to do 4 or 5 or maybe even 10 cocoons at a time because the silk is soaked in so you have to do these together and then once you have done that then you have to twist those together and then twist them again and it's really hard to do that but they did those things at home on a small scale for their own sewing needs and part of it for the neighbors I never heard of that but that probably was more true I didn't look into just how they got it around but I know around here Dolly Stetson for example it was a family thing just within the family and the neighbors but you know if one person is good at each of them is good another stage where they can trade it is a useful thing to be able to do and that's it well thank you all so much thank you