We'll start, as we usually do, by heading to the mid-1800s when virtually every Pennsylvania farm had a flock of sheep, the second most profitable livestock to raise following cattle. The sheep were not raised for their meat. Mutton, in fact, was considered an inferior meat. Sheep were raised chiefly for their wool. During the 1830s, a "Merino craze" took place in which the price of fine wool soared to over a dollar a pound and that ushered in a short period of love of farmers for raising sheep. A "merino" is prized for its wool and is said to have the finest and softest wool of any sheep.
The craze for the Merino wool lasted only about ten years, although the sheep stayed around the farms after the craze was over. Capitalists saw a chance to make some easy money and they got in the act investing their money in sheep, then giving the sheep to farmers for a rental of half the wool and half the increase of the flock. This was a very profitable endeavor for the capitalist while at the same time it got many poor farmers into the business of farming. When the Tariff Act of 1842 was passed, it imposed a duty of forty per cent on imported wood and woolens. The wool industry was off and running! Wherever there was water power a woolen mill seemed to spring up. The world was rosy for the farmer and the expectations bright for those who invested in woolen mills.
A man by the name of John Watson opened a woolen mill in Millville in 1813. Now make sure that year sinks in. James Madison was president, Andrew Jackson was off with 2,000 men in Florida doing battle with Indians, the British were blockading Long Island Sound and an embargo with Great Britain was announced. Up in North Andover, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Stevens opened a woolen broadcloth mill which was the first mill in the United States to produce and market flannels. The United States was in its infancy.
To understand the need for a woolen mill like the one in Millville, it is important to understand the early methods of milling wool. Cloth merchants from built-up areas traveled to the county to buy wool from the sheep farmers and then would distribute the wool to different farm families to make into cloth. The girls and women of the household would wash the wool to get dirt and natural oil off the wool, then they would "card" the wool. "Carding" was the combing of wool between nails until the fibers were all pointed in the same direction. It was somewhat like brushing hair with a giant hair brush. The wool would then be spun into thread using a spinning wheel and wound onto a bobbin, often by an unmarried daughter--the derivation of the word "spinster" to describe someone who is not married.
The thread would be woven into cloth with the aid of a hand- and foot-operated loom, the kind often seen today in antique shops. This job was demanding enough that it fell to the men or older boys but the entire job of weaving raw wool into cloth could be accomplished entirely within a single household. When a certain interval went by, the merchant would bring more wool and take the finished cloth to the city to sell or export.
Watson's early plant in Millville was made up of two carding machines and a fulling mill. Fulling is the cleaning of wool to get rid of oil, dirt and other impurities by scouring and milling the cloth. The person who runs the equipment is called a "fuller." The cloth was then stretched on frames known as "tenters" and held on those frames by "tenterhooks." You may have heard the expression about being in suspense as "being on tenterhooks.
Farmers brought wool for cleaning and carding to the mill, then it was taken back to the individual homes where the cloth would be woven. It later came back to the mill in the form of "homespun" which was then colored and pressed. The opening of a woolen factory in Millville was a new concept, but it helped propel Millville into an thriving community of stores, factories and planing mills.
Watson, a native of London, married a daughter of John Eves in 1806--which could account for why he was in Millville in the first place. He built his mill on the west side of Little Fishingcreek in the area we know today as Iola and operated it for a number of years until he and his wife moved to Canada to live near his wife's widowed sister.
The business then passed to Watson's brother-in-law, Chandlee Eves, who moved the business to the east side of Little Fishingcreek. Eves died in 1835, and the ownership of the mill passed to his son Benjamin. The owner and the business prospered as the Civil War created a large demand for white and striped Army blankets made in the factory.
In 1866, perhaps because of the number of woolen mills in the state that burned to the ground,
the mill building was enlarged as a brick structure.
Child labor was used extensively in the mill. A waterwheel at the south end of Iola powered the mill and later a second dam closer to the mill was constructed, but was lost in an 1888 flood.
What the government gave to the woolen industry by the Tariff Act of 1842 it soon took away with new tariff acts of 1846 and 1857. These tariff acts reduced the duty to about half that of the Act of 1842. A panic and then hard times began in the years following 1857. Many woolen mills were closed in the state. I have read that as many as 110 mills closed. Our farmers just could not compete. It cost from a dollar to two dollars a head to raise sheep in our state, while the upper Mississippi Valley was able to do it for twenty-five to fifty cents per animal.
Even dogs became a menace to our sheep. Each farm seemed to have from two to four dogs at all times, and most female dogs got pregnant at every opportunity. Marauding dogs wiped out flocks of sheep for many farmers, as have coyotes, bear and bobcats. The problem became so severe that on June 12, 18 78 , the government passed "An Act for the Taxation of Dogs and the Protection of Sheep." One Cambria County farmer shot his neighbor's dogs and in return had his barn burned to the ground. It wasn't until 1921 that a dog law with some teeth in it (hey--I can't think of any jokes to tell today) put the responsibility for supervision of licensing and enforcement by county officials in the hands of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. The killer dogs were on their way to extinction.
Dairy cows were becoming a more successful crop than sheep when something happened to stimulate the woolen industry. The Civil War (1861-1865) gave sheep and wool another upsurge, the last hurrah of the industry. The factory was important industrially during the war years. During the Civil War, the factory was housed in a two-story frame building. The industry flourished so well that the three-story building that was later built was constructed over the old building. The old building was not torn down until the new building was practically completed in order that business was not disrupted.
The Tariff Acts were tinkered with in an attempt to keep the industry thriving. By 1890, as man-made fibers became more available, only a few small rural woolen mills were still in operation, remnants of the hundreds of a century earlier. Most of the mills were concentrated in the Philadelphia area with less than four per cent of the wool processed in these factories actually produced in our state. During these years, the Millville factory continued to turn out wool products.
The mill had a succession of owners. Charles W. Eves owned the mill until 1875, followed by the partnership of Shadrack and (Parvin) Eves. The executor for Parvin sold his interest to Shadrack in 1883. The Bloomsburg plant of the Enterprise Worsted Mill Company, organized in 1891, moved to Millville late in the 1890s and moved into the woolen mill building along the present Route 42 in the north end of Millville across the road from the present Fran's Dairy Bar.
In 1894, a group of local businessmen organized what they called the Millville Worstered Mill Company but two years later the property went up at sheriff's sale and was purchased by some of the stockholders. "Worster" is well-twisted woolen yarn made from long staple wool and used in the manufacture of suits and other garments. Men like Richard Tompkin, Edward Thorp, Walter Skerry and Amory Skerry were involved in the mill.
For a list of Millville residents who were employees of the mill in 1901, go here.
In 1902, "splendidly tailored woolen suits" were selling from $15 to $17.50 in Philadelphia , according to a scan of the Philadelphia Inquirer for that year. There were other suits ranging up to $30, but the point is that the price of woolen suits was not high.
World War I produced a brief flurry in wool, but the wool that sold for fifty cents a pound in 1850 just couldn't climb over twenty-eight cents a pound in 1910. There was also a spurt in 1918 when war-time demand made prices soar to three times the pre-war prices.
Amory Skerry ran the mill from when he bought it in 1914 until it closed as a woolen mill. Wayne Hartranft then purchased the building and made it into a chicken hatchery. After seventy-four years of providing employment to the residents of the Millville area, it burned in 1940.
For many years there was a swinging bridge, sometimes known as the "spooning bridge," over Little Fishing Creek between Millville and Pine Township at the former Herbert Henrie farm adjacent to Route 42. The bridge served employees of the Enterprise Worsted Mills, many of whom walked from what is known as "Legion Hill" to the mill.
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The Millville Borough Council ordered the removal of the bridge in March, 1970, when it was declared unsafe and too costly to maintain. Photo courtesy of Harry Watts |
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The location of the former woolen mill is now the home of the Ervin Pursel family. The property is owned by Joe Hopewell, Millville . It is located along Blackbird Road , between North Chestnut Street and Route 42 between Millville and Iola. |
During the days of the mill and chicken hatchery, route 42 ran in front of the building. Today, Route 42 runs to the rear of the property.
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Information and photographs for this article came from Harry Watts, whose father, Edgar Watts, a Millville firefighter, was taken to Bloomsburg Hospital for treatment after stepping on a nail while fighting the fire in the burning building in 1940. Additional information was derived from the book, Millville the First 200 Years, by Dean B. Girton and Paul Trescott, and from the historical content stored at the Columbia County Historical Society.
