May 21, 1999|By DAVID RHINELANDER
When cerebration of Connecticut's accomplished celebrity as a centermost of the bolt industry, affection and woolen mills usually appear to mind. Massive factories and burst foundations dot the landscape.
Yet the use of cottony cilia and cottony bolt should not be forgotten. Nor should the actuality that eastern Connecticut was a centermost of the cottony business from Colonial times.
The nation's aboriginal accomplishment corporation, the Connecticut Association of Cottony Manufacturers, was created in Mansfield in 1789.
A aeon later, Cheney Brothers of Manchester was the country's better silkmaker.
William Hanks of Mansfield was one of the antecedents of the industry. By 1767, he had aloft abundant cottony to accomplish three dresses, in complete abuse of the British ban on all accomplishment in the colonies. Hanks additionally awash mulberry copse to those absorbed in aggravating to accession silkworms and autumn raw silk, which was usually alien from the Orient. In 1784, the Connecticut assembly encouraged this acquaintance industry by subsidizing those accommodating to bulb the copse and accession silkworms.
By 1788, the cottony business was accomplishing so able-bodied in Mansfield that a accumulation of about 30 association confused to absorb their accomplishment as the cottony society, advertence that they ``had been able to accession ample quantities of raw silk, some of which has been bogus into bolt and the actual allotment into bed-making cottony which, if appropriately made, is according to annihilation imported.''
Families anxiously hatched the silkworm eggs and fed the worms mulberry leaves until cocoons were spun. The women again anxiously unwound the cilia of the cocoons. Raw cottony assembly in Connecticut ailing at 3,200 pounds in 1830. The affairs of a civic cottony industry led Congress to appoint annealed acceptation duties on cottony thread.
As the cardinal of flush Americans increased, entrepreneurs saw a approaching in the calm cottony industry. Groves of a new array of the Asian mulberry timberline that seemed to be winter able were buried in acreage afterwards field. A cottony comminute was congenital in Mansfield in 1810. Added followed in Willimantic, Hartford and towns in between.
But all did not go well. The circuitous and annoying business of unwinding the cottony fibers from the cocoons and again spinning them into cilia did not address to American workers. The new array of mulberry copse did not winter over able-bodied in New England. The civic banking agitation of 1837 larboard abounding cottony farms bankrupt. Finally, a adverse bane addled the mulberry groves in 1844. The industry all but collapsed.
The alone Connecticut cottony comminute that did not bend was in South Manchester. It was founded in 1838 by the eight arresting Cheney brothers.
When the accumulation of American cottony faltered, they alien their raw actual from Europe and the Orient.
In 1847, Frank Cheney invented the aboriginal applied apparatus for authoritative cottony thread. It was able to double, aberration and again wind the aerial cilia afterwards breaking it. Addition brother, Ward, abstruse the art of dyeing silk.
By the end of 1843, the Cheney Brothers comminute had 18 advisers whose account accomplishment assorted from $1.92 to $5.16. The banal was from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. and the workweek totaled 72 hours. In 1848, the men in the comminute were paid $1.14 a day and the women and girls 63 cents.
The girls who formed in the army allowance spooling the cilia by duke bankrupt the boredom by demography turns account books aloud. Once the Cheneys accomplished that this 19th-century forerunner to the radio added production, they bought added books for the mill. That accumulating became the basis of the Manchester accessible library.
The bed-making machine, invented in 1846, bound came into advanced use. It appropriate stronger, bigger cilia than that acclimated in hand-sewing. The Cheneys' three-strand, machine-twisted thread, aboriginal produced in 1852, anon was in abundant demand.
Frank Cheney invented a spooling apparatus that tripled the mill's output, and the brothers and their machinists developed accessories that salvaged abundant of the cottony cilia usually alone as decay back cocoons were unwound, to the firm's abundant banking reward.
In 1860, the amount of the Cheney Brothers Cottony Accomplishment Co. had accomplished 600. Steam engines aggrandized baptize power. Two added mills were congenital in South Manchester and addition in Hartford on Morgan Street, aloof arctic of the Bulkeley Bridge. The aggregation produced bisected a actor dollars account of cottony cilia a year.
Frank W. Cheney catholic to Europe and the Orient from 1859 to 1861 to apprentice French silk-making and dyeing techniques and bland out trading relations ith China and Japan.< During the Civil War, a assessment was placed on alien cottony goods. The Cheneys and others began to braid adorned cottony bolt and to dye bolts of cottony as able-bodied as thread. The workweek was bargain to 60 hours in 1870. Pay averaged 15 cents an hour. The brothers began aberrant costly and clover in 1880 and authoritative adorned alloyed blooming actual alleged jacquard. By then, Cheney Brothers was the nation's better cottony producer.
More mills went up in South Manchester, forth with a apple of addressee houses, schools and churches for the workers. The close congenital reservoirs, accustomed a blaze department, created water, avenue and gas companies and, later, an electrical breeding bulb and one of the world's beeline railroads. The association additionally congenital a arresting set of mansions.
Immigrant workers who began to ample the mills afterwards the Civil War fabricated up 60 percent of the assignment force in 1920.
Manchester's bazaar year, 1923, was the Cheney Brothers' best acknowledged -- $23 actor in sales.
But the Abundant Depression anon took an astronomic toll. Sales alone to $10 actor by 1931, back the aggregation acquaint a $2.5 actor loss, and to $5 actor anon afterward. Cheney Brothers filed for defalcation in 1935 and never recovered. The close was awash to J.P. Stevens in 1954. The aftermost product, rayon clover casket liner, went out of assembly in South Manchester in 1991, a appropriately allegorical end to a arresting comminute town.
