Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/482

466 1810, 1,040,000 yards of cloth and flannel were woven in families and dressed in these mills. In 1840 there were 2,585 fulling and carding mills in the United States. Forty years later this number had been reduced to 991; and, in the decade since 1880, the mortality among them has been even greater. In the mills which still remain, on the outskirts of civilization, the operation of fulling has been almost wholly abandoned, and custom-carding only is done for the neighbors who still spin and weave their homespun.

Of the early stages of the introduction of wool-spinning machinery in this country the records are exceedingly deficient. Spinning jennies, built by Arthur Scholfield as early as 1800, were the first actually utilized in this country, and are described as containing from twenty to thirty spindles, upon which a single woman could spin from twenty to thirty runs of fine yarn a day "in the best manner." These jennies cost about fifty dollars' and were operated by a crank moved by hand. In the history of the oldest woolen manufactory in Rhode Island, the Peace Dale Company, founded by Rowland Hazard in 1802, spinning and weaving were carried on wholly by hand, until about 1819, when a spinning jack of fifty-two spindles was operated.

The power-loom for weaving broad goods was not introduced until 1828. The date of 1830 has been fixed upon by Dr. Hayes as marking the successful introduction of the woolen manufacture in this country substantially with the principal