pearance on the stage clothed in fabrics of domestic manufacture. Premiums were again offered to encourage both the growth of the raw materials and their manufacture. Ladies' meetings for patriotic spinning were inaugurated in various colonies, and these continued down to and into the Revolutionary War.
With the outbreak of that war, serious attempts at the manufacture of woolen goods in factories began. Samuel Wetherill was regularly engaged in the manufacture of woolen fabrics in Philadelphia about the beginning of the Revolution, and had a contract with the Provincial Congress to supply army clothing. In 1770 Edward Parker received three hundred pounds from the Maryland Legislature to assist him in the manufacture of woolen and linen goods. He had five looms. Charles Carroll, the signer of the Declaration, had a similar establishment. Neither of these parties, in all probability, used any power. The first mill in which power was used was the Hartford Woolen Manufactory, established in 1788 by a company of thirty-one gentlemen, most of them Hartford merchants. The factory was erected on a small stream, whose power operated two carding machines. For several years this factory achieved an annual output of five thousand yards of cassimeres and broadcloths, worth about five dollars a yard. An Englishman named Wansey, who visited this country in 17 i4 and inspected the mill, wrote that these cloths could be sold for about the same price as English goods, delivered in the stores at Hartford, "but the fabric was very poor and hard in the spinning, and dearer than the British, loaded with all the expense of freight, insurance, merchant's profits, and nine and a half cents duty." The Hartford company could not compete with the English cloth, even with these advantages, as its early collapse proved. While it lasted, it was quite the sensation of the country round about. General Washington's visit to the factory in 1789 is minutely recorded in his journal, and the patriotic spirit was stirred by the fact that he appeared at his first inaugural clad in a suit of broadcloth presented by the owners of the mill. General Washington noted the fact that "all the parts of the business are performed at the manufactory except the spinning—that is done by the country people, who are paid by the cut." It was to this factory that Hamilton alluded in his celebrated report on manufactures. Another woolen factory was established at Stockbridge in 1780, and another at Watertown in 1700. The three mills had a capacity of about 15,000 yards per annum, valued at $75,000. In contrast with these figures we have the official value of the woolens exported from England to the United States in 1709 at 2,803,400,[1] or more than two fifths of that country's total
- ↑ Bischoff, vol. i, p. 270.
