The magazine of history with notes and queries, Vol. II, No. 4, October 1905Various
History
The magazine of history with notes and queries, Vol. II, No. 4, October 1905
Various
History -- Periodicals; United States -- History -- Periodicals
They do it partly for amusement and partly to satisfy an increasing
demand for such goods as our grandmothers wove, among people with so
much money that it is really doing them a service to separate them from
some of it. They have what is probably the only hand loom establishment
in this State, a practical exposition of the spread and possibilities
of the modern arts and crafts movement. It is right in line with the
present movement for hand work in wearing materials or house fabrics by
those able to pay the necessarily increased cost.
In fact there are but few such establishments in this country. In the
mountains of Kentucky hand weaving is still practiced, and the products
of the mountaineers, handled through a semi-public institution, have
a ready sale. In Massachusetts such goods are also selling. Mr. and
Mrs. Talbot first thought of the possibilities of remunerative trade
when they found a demand for hand weaving among friends who saw the
results of their work of three hours every evening--from seven to ten
o’clock--on the one loom with which they began work. Then they procured
another loom in Johnston, the town from which the first one came, and
set that up beside the one Mr. Talbot had bought as a curiosity. Now
they have hired a Swede woman to come to work at the loom during the
day. In Sweden all the girls are still taught in the country districts
to operate a hand loom, and this woman has not been in this country
long enough to forget what she was taught as a girl.
Mr. Talbot believes in old things. It is said by friends that there is
nothing modern in his house except the present members of the family.
He has one of the most strikingly beautiful mantels imaginable, taken
from one of the old houses on South Main Street, in which the quality
of the old town of Providence once lived, and his son and heir even
sleeps in one of the trundle beds of song and story. So when a friend
told him of the auction of goods of a collector of antiques in Johnston
he went to the sale. No one else seemed to want the old hand loom there
offered, so Mr. Talbot bought it, just for the sake of getting an
unusual antique.
There must be many such looms in the garrets of the South County and
other sections of the State, where they were shoved to one side half
or three-quarters of a century ago, but few of them are set up and in
working order as this one was. Mr. Talbot had the loom brought to his
home and then started to put it together again. What he did not know
about looms was vast and comprehensive, and Mrs. Talbot’s knowledge was
equally vain. But together and with the help of a friend or two whose
working idea of mechanics was as great as the Talbot willingness to
learn, they finally had it set up in the room Mr. Talbot had used for
his den. Then they went to work to learn how to run the thing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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