Curated by Peggy Church and Jamie Eves

Sponsored by the Windham Textile & History Museum. Co-sponsored by Windham Preservation, Inc. Funded by a Grant from Connecticut Humanities.

DEMONSTRATION

Weavers Peggy Church (right) and Susan Bruno (left) knit string heddles for an 18th-century barn loom. In modern looms, the heddles are made from stiff steel wires, with eyelets to hold the warp threads. In Revolutionary Era looms, however, heddles were “knitted” by hand from string, with loops tied in them to guide the warp threads. Knitting heddles was laborious, exacting, and time-consuming, and the finished heddles required greater skill to use.

REENACTMENT: PATRIOT SPINNING BEE

Volunteer spinners reenacted a Revolutionary patriot spinning bee on the Windham town green. On a warm, breezy, sunny August 2024 morning, a number of volunteer spinners brought their wheels and gathered on the town green in Windham, CT, to make homespun yarn. Although there is no direct evidence that patriot women organized such a bee in the Revolutionary era, it is likely that they did. It is known that patriot men held protests on the Windham green, including hanging an effigy of a stamp tax collector from a “liberty tree.” Windham Village (now known as Windham Center) was a center for patriot activity in northeastern Connecticut. It was the county seat of Windham County and site site of the county courthouse. Among the village’s residents were a several prominent patriot leaders and lawyers, including Eliphalet Dyer (a delegate to both the Stamp Act Congress and the Continental Congress) and Jedidiah Elderkin (an advisor to Governor Jonathan Trumbull). Samuel Huntington (also a delegate to the Continental Congress) grew up in Windham. Their wives would also have been ardent patriots.

DEMONSTRATIONS

Throughout the exhibit, crafters, artists, and historians presented live demonstrations about various aspects of Revolutionary Era textile production. Ann Galonska from the Mansfield, CT, Historical Society (left) spoke about the history of silk production in Mansfield, Windham, and neighboring communities. Her presentation included live silkworms, unwinding cocoons, and winding silk on a preindustrial winder, with the assistance of Peggy Church. Galonska also filled two display cases with memorabilia about sericulture in Mansfield. An important point is that, at the time of the Revolution, Connecticut farmers were raising silk worms and producing silk thread. Connecticut colony seemed poised to enter the global silk market, if only Britain’s restrictive mercantilist laws could be circumvented, a factor that underlay debates about nonimportation. Other speakers demonstrated spinning flax on a linen wheel, spinning on a great wheel, rug hooking, spinning wool, and lace-making, all with corresponding exhibit materials.The demonstrations and talks made it clear: homespun was a key part of the Connecticut economy, and women’s labor and skill were central to its production.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1630-1789.
• Lacey, Barbara E. The World of Hannah Heaton: The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman. (1988) 
• Lacey, Barbara E. “Women in the Era of the American Revolution: The Case of Norwich, Connecticut.” The New England Quarterly. Dec. 1980. Vol. 53, no. 4.
• Larned, Ellen D. History of Windham County, Connecticut. Vol. 2. (1880)
• Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. (1980)
• Sturges, Mark. “Fleecing Connecticut: David Humphreys and the Poetics of Sheep Farming.” The New England Quarterly. Sep. 2014. Vol. 87, no. 3.
• Trunzo, Jennifer M. Cantu. “Buying Out to Buy In: Ceramic Consumption on the Home Front During the American Revolution.” Historical Archaeology. 2012. Vol. 46, no. 2.
• Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. (2001)