Time was when … every home in New England had a spinning wheel. We can attribute the word “spinster” to that situation: a single woman who sat and spun wool into yarns, all day long. Many homes possessed a loom, but not every home. In Rhode Island, at the Slater Mill historic site in Pawtucket, a few years ago, we toured their representative home where a four point loom was set up. These looms are large, and houses were small. In fact, children did not have their own bed. They slept side by side, parallel to the top and bottom of the bed to conserve room, and to add body warmth to each other, in those days before central heating.
Time was when … children were exploited and made to work in unhealthy conditions in the factories, in mills such as the Slater Mill. With the windows nailed shut, and the door kept shut, to maintain a high humidity in the small mill, air borne cotton fibers found their way into lungs, causing consumption (TB), emphysema, pneumonia, and often, death. High humidity was kept so that cotton threads would not become brittle and snap, during the process of spinning the threads onto cones.
Time was when … one did not go to the store to buy new sneakers. A cow had to be slaughtered and the hide harvested and “tanned.” Shoes were custom made from the leather, sometimes by a father, or sometimes by a village cobbler. My mother, who worked at the International Shoe Company in Manchester, NH, (in the office, she always added), claimed to know good shoes and judged their quality by their “last.” The last is part of a shoe, and I really never inquired of her, during her lifetime, what she meant by “last.” I always thought it to be the inner support and general underpinnings. Maybe someday, I will become ambitious and try to find out the true meaning.
Time was when … and it was not so long ago, that when a person was sick, he or she was “bled” to rid the body of toxins. After awhile, physicians began to realize that patients died too often as a result of this practice, becoming weaker by the minute. In fact, during the nineteenth century, patients seems to have survived in spite of doctor care. There was no state of advanced medicine back then, and diseases that can be understood in this century, were a total enigma then.
From time to time, I like to think about the past. It is fun to think about how people lived. In our old house, there used to be a “root cellar” for storing garden produce like carrots, parsnips, potatoes, etc., during the long, cold winter. With a granite foundation, and no heat down there, it was an ideal location. Most of all, I like to think about quilting bees and barn raisings and other communal get togethers that ended in a banquet and a dance with fiddlers and such. It is fun to recall when communities came together for a common goal and a common sense of caring, something that we so often lack in society, today. Quilts represent so much, whether in the hands of the wealthy, and as products of the less-well-to-do. Begun as a pastime of the more well-heeled, traditionally, they are not the scrap craft art that is always mistakenly assigned to the women of Colonial History. That is a point that so many people and writers get wrong.
All for now,
Patricia Cummings
Quilter’s Muse Publications
