Coldengham, New York
Store of Cadwallader Colden, Jr.
Thread
John McMullen sold thread to the Colden Store on this day, 250 years-ago. There were over 125 transactions at the store involving thread. McMullen's transaction was only one of two sales of thread (presumably homespun) to the store (instead of sales from the store to customers.)
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| Skeins of silk thread ca. 1800-1850. Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London. |
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This article is one in a series of a daily accountings of Colden Store transactions. Be sure you read the first installment for an introduction to the store. You should also read this article which appeared in the Journal of the Orange County Historical Society.
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The McMullen surname appeared 32 times in the DayBook. Daniel (19 times) and John (13 times) were the given names. They were often represented by their wives at the store or by Daniel's son.
John McMullen appeared in the 1779 tax assessment for the Precinct of Shawangunk. At that date he had nine acres of land and £500 of personal property. Daniel was not enumerated in Hanover Precinct (the jurisdiction of the Colden Store) or Shawangunk.
Thread sold or bought at the Colden Store never appeared with any adjectives. Neither color, weight, quality, nor origin were stated.
On three ocassions, thread was sold by the ounce. On all other instances it was sold by the skein for about three pence each. The image above contains thread in skeins (but probably not in 18th century style).. The word 'skein' does not appear in Webster's 1828 dictionary but it was a word in use at the time.
The thread sold to the store was likely linen thread, spun from the fibers of flax. It was collected on a bobbin as it came off the spinning wheel. It was then wound on a clock-reel to create the skein or knot. Alice Morse Earle states that the revolutions of the clock-reel were counted and forty turns constituted a 'knot' or 'lay.' 'Twenty lays made a skein.... To spin two skeins of linen thread was a good day's work.'
'Silk' was also sold in skeins, so it is likely that this also was a thread, but the DayBook never described it as such. There were over 200 skeins of silk sold at the Colden Store at about one shilling each (about three times the cost of the (linen) 'thread').
Yarn could also be considered a "woolen thread" (it is defined as such by Webster in 1828). There are only four mentions of yarn in the Daybook and all of them were sales of homespun to the store by customers. Three were described as "Stocking Yarn."
I have discussed "Mohair" previously. I imagine it was also a 'yarn.' It was sold in quantities of "sticks" on over 200 ocassions!
Cotton threads did not come into wide use until the 19th century. It is likely that the majority of Colden's 'thread' transactions were linen thread, imported from England.
The Ramsay store in Alexandria, Virginia also sold large quantities of thread. However, Ramsay's ledgers contained numerous descriptors such as the color and type of thread. Most of the thread in Ramsay's store was sold by the ounce. I have not been able to look at the raw data to see if he differentiated between silk and linen thread.
Thread, of course, was used to hand-sew fabrics using needles (see June 23 blog). The linen thread was always waxed to prevent breakage and unraveling during sewing.
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