The UNH Flax-to Linen-Project Expands to Three Community Grow Sites

Posted by Dr. Kimberly Alexander

Director of Museum Studies and Senior Lecturer, UNH Department of History

James Hayes Fellow, 2023-2024 and 2024-2025

Funded by two fellowships from the UNH Center for the Humanities, the overall conceptual framework for this project began in a UNH History Department classroom in Spring of 2023 while teaching a new course for HIST600/800 entitled "From Homespun to Fast Fashion: A Global History of Textiles."  Now in our second year, in addition to growing, harvesting and processing flax and conducting primary source research, the Flax Team has presented over a dozen talks, given numerous demonstrations, and of note, opened an exhibition about the project at the Woodman Museum in Dover. (The exhibition entitled “Combing History: Flax and Linen in New Hampshire” is on view through 24 November 2024.)

For the 2024-2025 season, we shifted the project from its initial physical core at UNH and took what the project team learned about the growing and processing of flax out into the larger public Seacoast museum and history community. Dr. Alexander and graduate research assistants in the UNH History/Museum Studies program are working with three community partners (‘grow sites’), where each will grow flax and can incorporate hands-on teaching about the importance of growing flax and processing linen in New Hampshire into their public educational activities. Other related educational opportunities include discussions of sustainability, fast fashion and circular design models, gendered workspaces, and community agricultural events and seasonal celebrations.

 

There are three components to this next phase of the project: Allocating funds to three community partners as grow sites [Woodman Museum, Dover; Old Berwick Historical Society, South Berwick, ME, and Newmarket Historical Society, Newmarket]; exploration of the use of film shorts with film-maker Catherine Stewart to increase audience reach throughout New Hampshire and beyond and continued archival research. 

In the past, the unrecorded thousands of hours of cutting, retting, braking, spinning, dying, weaving, and sewing small clothes, bed linens, and all manner of domestic items contributed greatly to a New Hampshire family’s financial stability. This aspect of domestic production in rural economies continues to remain largely absent from history texts, particularly in the time before the mid-19^th century and the growth of the textile factory/industrial complex seen in just about every New Hampshire town.

 

The ability to deep dive into this single important fiber, while growing it at UNH and surrounding communities, offers a tremendous opportunity for university- and community-wide engagement and allows the extension of historic research surrounding our flax project to include 18^th and early 19^th century flax growing and linen production in the Seacoast.  The project started in the classroom and will continue evolve in the classroom, but it will spill out into the community, to Woodman Farm, and local archives, to presentations for interested groups both inside and outside UNH. It is anticipated that students will take this multi-faceted experience with them beyond the campus to expand in any number of ways.

 

Dr. Alexander’s research is funded by two James Hayes Fellowships from the UNH Center for the Humanities.

All photos are from community flax harvest days at the community grow sites.