On October 21st the UNH Flax-to-Linen Project Team participated in the Fall Family Open House at the Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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| Sophie demonstrates using a flax brake |
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| Sydney talks about combing flax |
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| Sophie with the flax brake she constructed, based on plans furnished by Woolgathers |
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| A nice bag full of combed flax -- next up is spinning |
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BETH GALLUCCI '24G, A MUSEUM STUDIES STUDENT, HARVESTS FLAX AT WOODMAN FARM. PHOTO BY DAVID VOGT. |
By Beth Potier, UNH Communications and Public Affairs
The path to a deeper understanding of rural New England’s pre-industrial textile
economy begins in a muddy field on the edge of UNH’s Woodman Horticultural
Research Farm. There, a historian and an agriculture professor, along with
students in UNH’s museum studies program, have joined forces for an intimate,
experiential understanding of an iconic fiber: Linen.
“Linen was such an important staple in New Hampshire,” says Kimberly Alexander,
senior lecturer of history and the force behind The Flax to Linen Project.
“The opportunity to deep dive into this single important fiber while actually
growing it at UNH offers a tremendous opportunity for … research into 17th through
early 19th century flax-growing and linen production in the Seacoast.”
Read on: https://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2023/09/flax-linen-project-weaves-history-experience
By Beth Gallucci, History and Museum Studies MA Program
Born in 1719 in Ulster, Ireland, Matthew Patten emigrated to America with his family in 1728. The Patten’s were among the many Scotch-Irish Presbyterian families who came to America to escape religious persecution in Northern Ireland.[1] Matthew and his brother Samuel moved to Souhegan-East in 1738 which is now known as Bedford, New Hampshire. Patten was a jack-of-all-trades like many New Hampshire settlers of the 18th century. He worked as a carpenter, joiner, farmer, surveyor, justice of the peace, and a probate judge in the town of Bedford. His diary was recorded from 1754 to 1788, written on individual, unbound pages, in the form of a daily account, documenting life in the second half of the 18thcentury. Though Patten’s narrative may not appear to be a colorful one, he certainly provides the reader a glimpse into the life of a farmer on the colonial frontier and enables historians like us to engage with his world of planting flax.
Patten intermittently records the planting and harvesting of flax by himself, his family members and a mixture of men and women who were hired as help. Though his accounts are more detailed regarding the planting of rye, corn and barley, Patten duly notes (most years) the seasonal process of sowing flax in May and harvesting and “swingling” flax in the fall. The crop seems to be a staple in his household, and he records the annual hiring of women (and it is always women) to come and live in his home for six to eight weeks “to spin.” He does not discern whether it is flax or wool that they are spinning but flax was usually spun in late fall or early winter, and this is when Patten usually notes that women came to spin. A diary entry dated September 27, 1760, notes that Matthew paid Hannah Chamberlin 12 pounds for 6 weeks of spinning work, and on February 5th of 1766 he mentions that he “finished” 100 pounds of flax that year, giving the reader an idea of how much he harvested per year. He mentions taking linen and tow cloth to various people to make “britches” and dresses. This work is completed by men or women depending on who he was able to hire at that moment in time. Of particular interest, he mentions a man by the name of McCleary who weaves striped linen for him. Patten often uses flax seed to barter for payment of goods and services and he also receives flax seed as payment for services rendered.
There is a communal feel to how Patten and his surrounding neighbors work in harmony with one another to survive living in rural New Hamsphire. They barter and trade for many of their items and credit is also used quite often. They seem to know who they can trust to make good on payments, and Patten and his neighbors seem diligent about paying their debts. His entries revolve around documenting his agricultural practices along with his financial and contractual obligations, however Patten does note weather conditions, illnesses, and various social issues such as births, deaths and marriages.
He provides only small glimpses of the political issues brewing throughout the colonies, such as the Pine Tree Riots of 1772 and the shots fired at Concord in1775, but never goes into great detail about his political views. He does mention that his son John joins the Continental Army, but never mentions the fact that he was shot in the arm at Bunker Hill in June of 1775. A diary entry from May 21, 1776, reveals John’s battle injury but also demonstrates Patten’s heartfelt emotions of loss and anger when he describes John’s death while he was stationed in Canada with the Continental Army.[2]
John contracted smallpox, and while severely sick his regiment had to relocate further south, and John had to relocate with them. Matthew attributes his son’s death to being moved “in a weakened state” and to being shot in the arm while fighting at Bunker Hill the year before. This account is the only entry where Matthew vehemently shows anger towards the British by calling King George III a “Tyrannical Brute” (p. 361).[3]
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| Matthew Patten Homestead - Demolished in the early 20th century.[4] |
[1] Kenneth Scott, “Matthew Patten of Bedford, New Hampshire,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society (1941-1965) 28 (September 1950): 3, 129-145.
[2] Matthew Patten, The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H: From Seventeen Hundred Fifty-Four to Seventeen Hundred Eighty-Eight, Rumford Printing Company, 1903. Scholar Select, Franklin Classics.
[3] Matthew and his wife Elizabeth had 11 children and his papers were preserved by his daughters, Sarah and Polly. Written on plain white paper that was folded together and bound with linen thread these papers made their way into the hands of the townspeople of Bedford, New Hampshire. The townspeople felt they were of great importance and had them published in 1903. Patten’s original papers have been preserved and can be found in the New Hampshire State Library in Concord. Matthew’s son James moved to Ohio in 1789 and was captured by the Delaware Indians in 1791. He was held captive for four years until he was released in 1795 in a prisoner exchange. The University of Michigan has a collection of 16 letters written by James, Matthew and Elizabeth along with other members of the Patten family.
[4] Photo of the Matthew Patten Homestead – early 20th century: https://theclio.com/entry/170979
“Processing flax is difficult and so is life. Don’t give up trying if there is something you want to do.” ---Shirley Walker, 2023
Editor’s Note: Transcribed by Sydney Rue, History and Museum Studies MA Graduate Student and Flax Project Research Assistant. Held on site at the Newmarket Historical Society, June 28, 2023. This is a condensed and lightly edited version of a longer talk with Shirley Walker. Care was taken to transcribe and convey the essence of the speaker.
Shirley Walker: Hello, my name is Shirley. I am 87 years old, and I have Parkinson's disease. Previously, I planted and processed flax at Canterbury Shaker Village, the New Hampshire Farm Museum, and at home. I brought some things to refresh my memory. Now, to begin with, you cannot grow flax with the purpose of producing fiber from any old seed. You need special varieties such as Linum usitatissimum.
SW: Next, I planted the seeds in the middle of May, once they would be safe from frost. When sowing the seeds, you do not need to tamp them down. You just rake a little dirt over them. Ideally, the soil should be enriched. The flax I grew in my garden benefited from the vegetables I grew in the same soil. At the New Hampshire Farm Museum, the small patch we grew the flax in was wonderfully enriched. You should always sow the seeds by scattering. Please tell me that you didn’t plant in rows?
Kimberly Alexander: Yes, we planted by scattering.
SW: Good! You don’t want side branching, by planting the flax close together it grows straight. In the end, the flax should be three to four feet tall. Four feet is lovely. It should be about the size of a yard stick.
SW: Once the plants are a couple weeks old, you can step on them without worrying about damaging them. Any really big weeds should be removed.
SW: Harvesting happens 90 to 100 days after planting. The exact date depends on the amount of sun, rain, and the soil quality that the flax is planted in. Once the flowers bloom, you should wait around thirty days to harvest. They don’t last long. The stock should be turning brown, and only a couple of flowers should be left in the field.
SW: When you harvest, you pull the flax out of the ground by its stock. You never want to cut it because the fibers continue into the roots. In order to get the best quality fiber, you have to pull it. You just grab small handfuls of the flax and pull it up.
SW: Once harvested, you need to dry the flax. Stooking allows the flax to dry because the air can flow through the bundles. You take the flax and lean it against one another [mimes a triangular shape].
Sydney Rue: Like when you arrange kindling for a campfire?
SW: Exactly. That’s the first round of drying. Next, you remove the seeds with a ripple. You just draw the flax through the teeth of the ripple and the seeds fall off. Those seeds are not good for sowing because you harvested them before they could fully ripen. If you want to plant the seeds you grew, you need to leave some flax planted until the stock is dry.
SW: The seeds aren't fully clean at this point. I would catch the seeds with a tarp and then dance on them. Flax seeds are strong. When I put them through my blender to make flaxseed meal, some seeds survive. Don’t worry about damaging them. I never did this, but you can wait for a windy day and throw the seeds into the air. The seeds are heavy and will fall to the ground, but the excess fiber will be blown away.
SW: Next is retting. There are two types: dew and water retting. When I grew flax at home, I used the water retting method. I filled a tub with water and submerged the flax in it with a weight to hold it down. Enzymes will break down the hard outer layer of the flax and leave the fibers unharmed. At Canterbury Shaker Village, we did dew retting. There was enough space to lay out the flax in the fields there. Once a week, I would turn the flax over for six to seven weeks. Water retting takes only a couple of days. To prevent the water from becoming putrid, I would change out a third of the water every day.
SW: You’ll know if the fibers have finished retting by taking a stock and snapping it. If the fibers break, it is too late you’ve lost the fiber. Water retting is risky because if it is hot the enzymes work faster. The flax can go from being fine to too far gone within a couple hours. I would check it every couple hours to make sure it was okay. Experimentation is important. If it doesn’t come out the first time, there is always next time.
SW: Finally, you dry the flax again by stooking it. Before you can finish processing it, it has to be dry. Once it's dry, you don’t have to work with it right away. You can leave it in storage.
SW: Before you begin breaking the flax, you should check several samples to make sure it's ready. When you put the flax into the flax break, you hold it by the roots and the end of the stock goes in the break. You move the flax slowly through the break. After you finish the first pass, you might have to repeat the process. This releases the boon and the good long fiber.
SW: Next you use a scutching knife, a wooden blade, to scrape off the wooden outside pieces of the flax. This releases the fibers. Scutching is a long and tiring process.
SW: Then with heckling combs, the fibers get pulled straight and clean. You use finer and finer combs to remove debris and tow from the fibers. For the finer flax, you can use wool combs.
SW: From there, the fibers are attached to a distaff. A friend and I went to Vermont and a gentleman made us large new distaffs for spinning the flax. You spread the long fibers out in an incredibly thin layer on a table. More and more thin layers are added until you roll the distaff onto them and secure the fibers to the tool. This orients the fibers for spinning.
SW: I never got the hang of this method. Instead, I preferred to gather smaller amounts of fiber and comb them straight. You place a towel–a thin towel made of cotton or fittingly linen– horizontally across your lap along with the fiber and roll it up until you have a bundle.
SW: When you spin flax, you should always have a bowl of water next to you so you can wet your hands.
SR: Do you need a special wheel to spin flax?
SW: No, you don’t need a double-flyer flax wheel. You can use a normal or a great wheel–the wheels that you operate standing up.
SW: Once you have some yarn spun, wind it off into a loop and scour it. Scouring removes the oils and pectin from the linen. You add the spun fiber to boiling water with Borax or soda ash and dish soap. Scoured linen is brighter and softer to the touch.
SW: Weaving linen is a process. It wants to break. You should never weave linen in front of a fire or other heat source as that will dry out the fiber and weaken it. The fibers have to be moist. You should spray the fibers with water as you weave them but be careful not to oversaturate the fibers or they might mildew.
SW: At Canterbury Shaker Village and New Hampshire Farm Museum I would come in and do weaving and spinning demonstrations. For more information on weaving, look into New Hampshire Spinners & Dyers Guild and Northeast Hand Spinners Association. Both organizations put on events each year. Don’t be afraid to look into different guilds and don’t be afraid to go.
SW: Processing flax is difficult and so is life. Don’t give up trying if there is something you want to do.
END
Thank you to Shirley Walker and the Newmarket Historical Society for assisting us with our research.
Hello - I am Professor Kimberly Alexander, Director of Museum Studies & Senior Lecturer in the History Department at UNH. My research and teaching examines material culture with a focus on historic textiles, and so I am excited about directing the Flax to Linen Project. This experimental undertaking explores the year-long cycle from planting to harvesting of flax, through its production and processing as linen. Linen was a common textile used in early America. Funding from the UNH Center for Humanities, James Hayes Fellowship, allows me to introduce my graduate and undergraduate students into every phase of this New England experience as told via material culture and primary sources - account books, journals, diaries, newspapers, and probate inventories from the 17th through the early19th century.
If you would like to know more about my publications, teaching. and public engagement, you can find me here: https://findscholars.unh.edu/display/ksd38
Invaluable assistance for this project is provided by COLSA Professor Rebecca Sideman, Department Chair, Agriculture, Nutrition, and Food Systems, and Evan Ford, Manager of the Woodman Horticultural Research Farm and the Kingman Research Farm. Financial support comes from a James Hayes Fellowship from the UNH Center for the Humanities and the History Department Harris Fund.
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| Professor Rebecca Sideman https://colsa.unh.edu/person/rebecca-sideman |
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| Evan Ford, Farm Manager https://colsa.unh.edu/spotlight/evan-ford |
Hello, my name is Sophie MacDonald and I am a Museum Studies student at the University of New Hampshire. I love being able to experience history in person and am passionate about giving others the same opportunity to learn. Recreating historical processes allows researchers to truly grasp the skill and labor required to thrive in the past. This flax project is incredibly exciting because it allows me to deeply understand the process and work that went into the creation of a single scrap of fabric. Turning a simple plant into cloth is an impressive example of the continuation of knowledge over generations.
Hello! My name is Erica Linderman and I am a PhD Candidate at the University of New Hampshire. I am thrilled to be a part of Team Flax and can't wait to see how this project unfolds. For me, history is storytelling; learning about the day-to-day lives of people deepens our understanding of the past and offers a way to make history more accessible. My work focuses on citizenship in New England during the Early Republic and how people navigated their communities in a world where the rules of citizenry were ill-defined. Flax played an integral role in the inner workings of New England communities, so to be able to part of this project and glean more information on the importance of flax was an opportunity I wasn't going to pass up.
Hi! My name is Zoe Sizemore. I am a Museum Studies Master's student at the University of New Hampshire. I have always really enjoyed history and creating projects that are accessible to the general public. I am very excited to be working on this project because of the digital component that will allow people from all over to explore our project virtually. I think it is very important to be as inclusive as possible when creating a history project and that was one of the reasons why I was so excited to be able to work on the Flax Project for my internship with Professor Alexander.
Hello, I am Katherine Morgan, a community member who became involved in the Flax Project after auditing Professor Alexander’s class which focused on the global history of textiles Spring semester, 2023. Though I was a high school English teacher, history has been an avocation and I have researched, edited and published the correspondence of my great grandmother to and from her mother (1868 - 1882) in a book entitled My Ever Dear Daughter, My Own Dear Mother. My interest in the flax project is primarily to help establish the local historical context for flax growing and its transformation into linen for household use and as a commodity in early New England.
Not pictured: Alison Hertweck, Alex Runyon and Ryan Cutting
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| Sophie measures and sketches a hemp break at the Woodman Museum, Dover, NH |
Traditionally, from sowing to harvest to processing was a year-long cycle as revealed in historical accounts. Our project timeline is roughly May 2023-June 2024, which will encompass planting to harvest, process to production. We will work with Professor Sideman from the Sustainable Agriculture department on growing our crop while also undertaking the necessary historical research.
We sowed two varieties of flax seed — Avian and Nathalie -- on May 17th, 2023, and now, in mid-June, our plants our looking healthy and are approaching a foot in height. We plan to harvest the crop in late August or early September, at the beginning of the fall semester. [For updates on the growth of the flax, please see additional blog posts and attached videos.]
Historic Context
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| Account book kept by currently unknown Dover resident, c. 1779-1780 Woodman Museum, Ellen P. Rounds Collection, #3749 |
The cultivation, production and sale and trade of flax is an integral part of my scholarly research into New Hampshire’s pre-industrial, rural-based textile economy. I have worked extensively with the 18th century writings of shoemaker and Deacon Samuel Lane of Stratham, NH, General John Montgomery of Haverhill, NH and numerous other day and account books throughout New England, looking at the home production and sale of textiles at places like Portsmouth Market Day or via trade and barter with neighbors. The opportunity to deep dive into this single important fiber, while actually growing it at UNH offers a tremendous opportunity for university- and community-wide engagement and allows the extension of historic research surrounding the flax project to include late 17th through early 19th century flax growing and linen production in the Seacoast. For example, last summer, with the assistance of the Stratham Historical Society (one of our community partners) I located two c1825-35 child's dresses from the Lane family which are of homespun linen and handsewn. Through lengthy research, I was able to determine that the dresses were worn by Olivia Emeline Lane (14 November 1825- 4 September 1905) and made by her mother, Hannah French Lane (1802-1841). Look for a future post on these charming garments.
We are continuing to work with the Stratham Historical Society, the Newmarket Historical Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Portsmouth Athenaeum, the Moffatt-Ladd House, and the Woodman Museum, in addition to many others.
The concept for this project began in a University of New Hampshire (UNH) History Department classroom. During the Spring semester of 2023, I taught HIST600/800 "From Homespun to Fast Fashion: A Global History of Textiles." After several classes spent on an in-depth study of both the global and local history of growing flax for linen production, a student noted it would be a unique experience if we could try growing flax and processing it. My response--why not?
The class is now collaborating with UNH Extension Professor Becky Sideman from UNH’s Sustainable Agriculture program and is experimenting with growing flax, cotton, and rye in a 50’x50’ plot at the Woodman Agricultural Research Farm, part of the UNH Campus. After access to the plot was confirmed, class members (grad and undergrad working together) conducted research on the best type of flax seed for New England soil and textile production. The students and the Department are excited about the project, which will extend from spring 2023 through spring 2024. We hope it will generate more interdepartmental collaborative projects.
The following posts will introduce you to team members, track the growth of the flax, take you behind the scenes to New England museums and historical societies, and chart our experiments with everything from building a flax break to harvesting, retting and scutching the flax and -- we hope--processing enough linen thread to make a small article of clothing.
Our methodology is both experiential and archival-- based on the knowledge shared in newspapers, documents, letters, diaries, and almanacs, as well as the surviving textiles made and saved by those living in the Seacoast of New Hampshire during the late 17th through early 19th centuries. We thank these frequently anonymous individuals for taking the time in their busy world to record their endeavors.
A reminder to our community that Dr. Kimberly Alexander will be hosting a flax processing demonstration at Vernon Family Farm in Newfields,...
