The Dye House
A Little Building with a Big History
North Stonington was known for the vivid indigo blue yarns dyed here, and plaid fabrics woven in the local homes. This cottage industry was the beginning of the Industrial Age...
North Stonington shop keepers kept this system going almost into the 1850's: it is unique to our town.
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Our Dye House was owned by Horace Babcock, a dyer known for producing nine different values of indigo by a secret process using plant-based dyes. Yarns were even brought to our dye house from other towns so they, too, could be dyed by North Stonington's expert dyers.
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These specific patterns were known as "Stonington Plaid" (a term that, at the time, included checks and stripes). Stonington Plaid was mostly sold as slave cloth. The home woven plaids from North Stonington were undoubtedly of better quality than the earliest industrial mill weavings (which were known to fall apart). This helped to bolster North Stonington's unique experiment and built up the economy of "Milltown" as we were then known.
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Our Dye House showcases fiber craft - silk, wool, and cotton and the tools and dyes used to create cloth with them in the 1800's.
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After spinning became mechanized in the early 1800's, the Dudley Wheeler Store, the J H Browning Store, and the Ephriam Russel Wheeler Store acted as "middle-men", bringing spun cotton yarn from Rhode Island mills to North Stonington weavers, who were paid at so many cents per yard in store credit.
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When the Rhode Island mills started mass producing weaving, they no longer needed North Stonington weavers, so local shop keepers went into cloth production for themselves, importing cotton, employing spinners and weavers, and setting up dye houses like ours.
Reproductions of store keeper Dudley Wheeler's plaids were recreated from instructions found in his store ledgers
Our Second-Saturday Open Houses feature weaving and spinning demonstrations, such as this one, recreating historic Stonington Plaid.
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A Spinning Wheel Dye Garden features Indigo, Madder and a host of other dye plants used historically in fabric, photography, and block printing.
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Come Visit!​
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