All the Northern and Eastern States shared in the advantages of this production, for which Virginia with the Western and Southern States paid; but in the whole Union New England fared best. Already the development of small industries had taken place, which, by making a varied aggregate, became the foundation and the security of Yankee wealth. Massachusetts taxed her neighbors on many small articles of daily use. She employed in the single manufacture of hats four thousand persons,--more than were yet engaged in the cotton mills. More than a million and a half of hats were annually made, and three fourths of these were sold beyond the State; between three and four million dollars a year flowed into Massachusetts in exchange for hats alone.[15] At Lynn, in Massachusetts, were made one hundred thousand pairs of women’s shoes every year. The town of Roxbury made eight hundred thousand pounds of soap. Massachusetts supplied the country with cut-iron nails to the value of twelve hundred thousand dollars a year. Connecticut supplied the whole country with tin-ware. New industries sprang up rapidly on a soil and in a climate where the struggle of life was more severe than elsewhere in the Union, and where already capital existed in quantities that made production easy. One industry stimulated another. Women had much to do with the work, and their quickness and patience of details added largely to the income of New England at the cost of less active communities. Their hands wove most of the cotton and woollen cloths sent in large quantities to the West and South; but they were inventors as well as workmen. In 1801, when English straw-bonnets were in fashion, a girl of Wrentham, not far from Boston, found that she could make for herself a straw-hat as good as the imported one. In a few months every girl in the county of Norfolk made her own straw-bonnet; and soon the South and West paid two hundred thousand dollars a year to the county of Norfolk for straw hats and bonnets.[16]