North Stonington's Dye House - a little building with a big history

Before North Stonington was known as a dairy town, it was in the textile business.  Its history is the story of our country - with all of its triumphs, tragedies and travails. 

Historic Stonington Plaid on display at the North Stonington Historical Society.

During colonial days, families did for themselves, whether building their houses, clearing the land, or making clothes.  Pretty nearly every family in New England grew flax to turn into linen, and kept sheep for wool.  Every homestead had a spinning wheel and a loom, and during the winter months the women and girls over 10 years old were kept busy making clothes for the family.

The Americas were blessed with a climate that produced many natural resources that were superior to that found in the Old World.  The cotton that grew here  had longer fibers than that in India and Egypt, making it easier to spin and turn into cloth. 

Cotton was sent to England during colonial times, and shipped back as finished cloth.  The English were very proprietary with the production of textiles and kept the colonies as a supplier of  raw materials and  a market for finished goods, rather than letting them produce for themselves.

Cotton was labor intensive, having to be tended, picked, cleaned, carded, spun, and woven - all by hand.  Eventually its production, and the slave labor that went along with it, seemed to be in decline.

During the heady days of the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence, the country was taken up with the utterly new concept of the inalienable rights of man.  And so it seemed that slavery might find some legal end.

But then technology took over. 

A device called the Spinning Jenny was invented in England, which, true to form, they kept secret from the rest of the world.  It was operated like a spinning wheel - by one woman turning a large wheel - but instead of producing just one spool of thread, she could produce fifteen or more.  An English man named Samuel Slater brought his knowledge of the device to Rhode Island and set up a mill, and by the early 1800's was able to use water power to spin the wheel and churn out even more cotton thread.

Suddenly there was a huge demand for cotton, sealing the fate of slaves, who were forced to stay in bondage in the new economy. The cotton gin was invented at the same time, making cotton production and thus slavery even more lucrative and more entrenched.

When Louisiana Purchase lands opened up, slaves like these were often separated from their families and marched in chains from the mid Atlantic to the deep South, a distance of over 1000 miles, in part to pick the cotton from which their clothes were made: It was the largest migration in US history before the 20th Century. They were given new clothes to wear on the auction block.

What the cotton mills (which had sprung up all over southern Rhode Island) did not have, however, was a machine that would produce cloth from the glut of threads they were creating.  They were in desperate need of weavers, and so they created a "putting out" system where they used area shop keepers to employ local citizens with looms to weave at home.

The shop keeper offered the weaver a few cents a yard in store credit for making 100 yards of shirting - cotton fabric that was 26 inches wide - a size that home looms could accommodate.  The shop keeper would pick up preset warps (the threads used lengthwise in weaving)  at the Rhode Island mills and distribute them to his weavers.

These warp threads on display in our dye house are set up to create Stonington Plaid

In a town with a small population, North Stonington shop keeper Dudley Wheeler had 600 weavers in his employ.  The other shop keepers in the village followed suit,  pulling weavers from the surrounding towns who would come into Milltown, as the village was then known, to drop off textiles and do the luxurious business of shopping, a novelty to people who had previously done most everything for themselves. 

The Wheeler Store ledger books owned by the Historical Society are full of credits paid for yards of plaid and sales of  tea sets and trinkets. Although families used their new income to raise their standard of living, many were simply making ends meet in hard times.  Previously the only respectable occupation for an unmarried woman was as a spinster working a spinning wheel; now she could also work as a weaver.  It was an opportunity for a poor girl to amass her own dowery through her labor, and marry well, lifting her station in life.

The mills had specific patterns of plaids, ginghams and stripes they wanted. Although they worked at home, weavers -  both men and women - had to do quality work and deliver on time or they would be docked.  The mills had job orders to fill, selling bulk orders to the plantation market in the south to clothe slaves. So much cloth was shipped out of Stonington Connecticut, that it was known as "Stonington Plaid." It was a lucrative business for southern New England, and kept weavers busy in towns all over Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

Eventually the mills figured out how to mechanize the relatively complex job of weaving, and no longer needed the shop keepers - that should have put Dudley Wheeler out of the cloth business. But in combing through his shop ledgers, researcher Susan Goody, discovered that  Wheeler clearly had made the unique decision to keep the system running by taking over the entire process:  Now in addition to dealing with weavers, Wheeler was  importing cotton, carding, spinning, and finally marketing the cloth he was producing.  It was at this point that our dye house came into being.

Indigo

Madder root was used to make orange

The Horace Babcock Dye House business and building was owned by Babcock, who was an accomplished dyer, but it was built on land owned by the Wheeler family.   Babcock was known for his ability to make nine varieties of blue from Indigo in a process known only to him.  His dyehouse would have looked similar to the silk dyehouse below, from Diderot’s 1772 Encyclopedia. 

Wheeler's energy and entrepreneurship cannot be overstated. He was importing logwood for dye from South America, Indigo dye from abroad, and selling cloth in the south and the West Indies, all while operating his store. According to Seth Rockman's book Plantation Goods, "Over a twenty-four month period in the mid 1840's Dudley Wheeler's weavers turned out one hundred thousand yards of fabric."  Wheeler was making his fortune and  Milltown  was becoming a vibrant place.

While New England was putting its industriousness to work outfitting plantations (tools and shoes were also made in Connecticut for slave use), many New Englanders were rethinking  the institution of slavery and forming abolitionist societies. Eventually an abolitionist candidate for president appeared, one John Freemont, and Freemont Societies were formed. Members often included the very  mill owners who were turning out slave cloth and other goods.  In this tract, written in 1848 by and for southerners, the irony of this position is noted, stating "the idea was more forcibly impressed upon my mind, when to-day I saw at the town pump, slaves clothed in plaids, manufactured at Stonington, by individuals who were officers of this same Fremont Club", a society in Stonington CT.

By the end of the 1840's North Stonington could not compete with the Rhode Island Mills, and many women either took up piece-work sewing   clothing for sailors, or moved and went to work at the larger mills in places like Norwich and Jewett City.  By the time of the Civil War, North Stonington had three mills that turned out cloth for the Union Army. When the war ended, so did our textile economy.  Milltown's heyday had come and gone.