Isabel Barber: In Her Own Words
By Jennie Shurtleff
Isabel Barber is just one of the many fascinating people who has lived in the greater Woodstock area.
On April 15, 2004, Virginia Christy interviewed Isabel for the Woodstock History Center’s Oral History Committee. While oral histories are an individual person’s story, they also are a way of preserving a community’s history. In her recording, Isabel mentions numerous people who lived in the Woodstock area and provides an insider’s view into several businesses, including the Vermont Workshop and the Bridgewater Woolen Mill.
Isabel was born in Buffalo, New York, but she moved to Woodstock in 1953 after visiting a friend who had recently moved to the town. During that visit, she stopped in at Nancy Wickham Boyd’s Vermont Workshop, which was located at the corner of Central Street and Lincoln Street. Nancy offered her a job on the spot.
Isabel Barber, around age 19, at the beach. Photo provided courtesy of Jill Barber Helmer, Isabel’s niece.
Isabel first worked at Nancy Wickham Boyd’s Vermont Workshop, shown above, after she moved to Woodstock. © Woodstock History Center
Isabel noted that Nancy Wickham Boyd “was a very interesting person, and I learned a great deal from her. I learned about people and about merchandising, and how you really had to be somewhat of a liar.” Isabel explained that when selling things, “I’d have to really sort of invent things as we went along; tell them [the customers] what they could use a certain article for and [how] wonderful it worked on a stove or a gas stove or whatever. You had to sort of surreptitiously find out whatever they were going to use it on and then make your story fit. It took a lot of imagination, and also she [Nancy] used to change the displays. She would just walk through the shop and pick up something and put it someplace else, and I’d turn around to show somebody a certain thing… and it wouldn’t be there anymore…”
Nancy “made the pottery. She made lamps and plates and bowls… Her work was done on … a potter’s wheel and shaped by her own hands. And the lamps were made in molds. In fact… if people wanted a pair of lamps, it was the only way they could get them because she’d do it in a mold… to get the exact shape she wanted. She would fool around and make a plaster mold,… make the item in plaster, and let it harden. Then she would send it to a mold maker. The mold is in two pieces as a rule, maybe three sometimes, and held together with elastic bands. You pour the liquid clay into the thing and roll it around and get it to coat the inside. Then when you think you’ve got it the right thickness, you stop adding anything and just leave it until it’s hardened a little and then you let it dry, and that’s the way you make the lamps. So I learned a great deal because she was always wanting help with whatever she did…”
“I worked with her for three years. And then I had an operation, and I came back from the operation. I could not lift very much, and I wasn’t supposed to lift anything for quite a while… And she said to me, ‘If you can’t lift anything, I don’t need you because all I’m doing is making pottery right now until the end of May, so I guess you better stay home.’ And so I went home and started calling on the telephone until I got another job.”
Isabel’s next job was working as the Classified Ad Manager for Walter Paine who ran the Valley News. While running the classifieds department, an advertisement caught Isabel’s eye. It was for a position that required good math skills and an eye for details. The name of the company wasn’t disclosed. Isabel submitted an application, and the next day she received a call from Bob Sharpe, who ran the Bridgewater Woolen Mill. He asked Isabel if he could interview her that very night explaining, “I’ll be very honest with you. A close friend of mine has a son that he wants me desperately to hire for this job, and I don’t really trust the young man to be able to do the job, or be happy in the job, or stay for a while. I’d really like to interview you first so at least I have two opportunities.”
Mill building across the street from the Bridgewater Woolen Mill. This building currently houses the Mill Village Apartments.
That night Isabel went for an interview, and, in Isabel’s words: “We just hit it off famously, really. He was the nicest man. And from then on he was almost like a father to me. He used to have me drive him and Mrs. Sharpe places on weekends, like if they wanted to go up to Stowe to visit somebody, they asked me to drive them up. He always had a Cadillac, and it was really nice. I was living in Woodstock…in the Parker’s apartment on Pleasant Street, and so I didn’t have any outside things to do, you know. So that was fun for me to drive for them. But anyway, he hired me on the spot. He said that I was the one he wanted of the two of us. That he knew I could do the job and would do it well, and that I would like it [in the office]. This was in the building opposite the [Bridgewater Woolen] mill, not in the mill itself… The building is now the Mill Village Apartments…”
Isabel continued noting, “Mr. Sharpe was only eighteen years old when he came to be the bookkeeper, and he stayed there [the Bridgewater Woolen Mill] his whole career. He was about in his eighties when he retired… So everything was old. The machinery was old and everything was old. And families, generations of families, had worked there and a lot of them had worked their whole lives there and died, and others – their great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, they had worked there. Everybody was related to everybody else. You couldn’t mention a name but you were treading on somebody’s toes!”
Regarding the products made at the mill, Isabel notes that the mill made “fancy woolens.” “Fancy woolens are generally made of dyed yarns that are woven as you would do hand weaving. The proper color is threaded through the loom in the right place to make a plaid or hounds-tooth or whatever. The opposite kind of weaving was called piece dying whereas the whole piece was woven in white if you were going to make it yellow or light blue or some light color, and maybe just a neutral beige natural color if it’s going to be a darker blue or dark green or whatever color. And the whole piece of woven cloth is dyed rather than dying the thread and weaving the colored thread…”
Often the materials made at the mill were customized. The customers would select a pattern and then have the material woven in the colors that they had chosen.
Woolen Blanket. Collection of the Woodstock History Center. Gift of the American Textile Museum.
Weave Room at the Bridgewater Woolen Mill.
© Woodstock History Center
Picking Room at the Bridgewater Woolen Mill. © Woodstock History Center
In order to produce the fabric, there were a number of specialized tasks that were done in different parts of the mill, such as the picker house, the dye house, and the card room. Isabel explains that in the “Picker House” they would receive the wool that came in huge bales, compressed with leather bands to hold it together. This wool had to be loosened up and taken apart. When selecting wool for a project, they would make a blend of different types of wool in order to insure that a consistent, reproducible cloth could be made. Isabel stated that sometimes the mill would make a fabric and then not get another order for that fabric for several weeks. Using a wool blend helped to insure that the product that they made weeks later was consistent with the original batch of cloth.
Blend picker. © Woodstock History Center
Dye kettle in basement. © Woodstock History Center
Almost every week, wool sellers would come with their bales of wool that Mr. Sharpe and Charlie Kendall [the cloth designer for the mill] would look over for color, texture, and cleanliness. They would select the wool they needed for their upcoming orders based on a particular recipe that would indicate how many pounds of each type of wool would go into making the cloth. They would then subdivide the wool and take it to the dye room in the basement so that it could be dyed different colors. Selecting colors for some of the material was a complicated process; for instance, if the wool were a plaid, they would need to determine how much of each color was in the plaid, and then determine how much wool would have to be dyed to make that amount of thread.
Machines in Card Room. © Woodstock History Center
After the wool was dyed and dried, it was taken to the card room. Isabel explains, “The cards were big drums that had teeth on them like a music box, you know a music box has all these little teeth on them. Well, the cards were something like that except they were a little more vicious looking and huge. And so these drums rotated in different directions. I think there were three drums or something, and one was the take-off drum and the other two sort of pulled the wool apart, and another one took it off and it coated the thing, but somewhere there was a comb-like [apparatus] that cleaned the card roll… I think it went through a couple of times, and then it would be spun into roving, which is … bigger than clothesline size and soft; bigger than you could ever knit with, and then that would be spun on the spinning trains which had the big spindles like that twisted that until it got very tight and sometimes twisted two or three strands of it, whatever the pattern called for, and made it into thread. And because it was twisted so much when the end was let loose it was all kinky. So after it was spun, it had to go into a steamer. The steamer… was a big box with holes in it, and the steam came from the boiler, and it went through these bobbins with the yarn on, and steamed them and got the kinks out.”
Machines in dressing room. © Woodstock History Center
After the wool was steamed, it was taken to the dressing room where the yarn was dressed onto big rolls to be put into the looms. This was especially important with those plaids that were complicated patterns. For instance, you might need to set up ten rolls of purple and ten rolls of blue, and at certain intervals, in between, you need to set up white and black rolls in order to create a plaid design. The rolls had to have the correct number of threads, in the correct colors, and in the correct order. From there the threads were put through paddles on the looms that had little loops in the middle of them. Once it was correctly threaded, as the machine operated, it would raise and lower certain colors of threads at the correct time in order to create the woven pattern.
While the looms were originally operated manually, by the time Isabel worked for the Bridgewater Woolen Mill, they were electrified, which enabled people to watch more looms simultaneously. The looms had to be constantly monitored to make sure there weren’t any broken or missing threads and that the shuttle had thread on it and had gone through correctly. When there were issues, the weavers had to shut down the looms and correct the problems.
Weaving Room. © Woodstock History Center
After a piece was all woven, Isabel notes, there were people in the finishing room with a big roller that was toward the ceiling, and they pulled the cloth down over the roller so that they could shine a light through the cloth. They had to look at every part of the cloth very carefully in order to insure that no threads were missing, broken, or knotted. If threads were missing, they’d weave them in. If there were extra threads, they’d be removed, and if there were knots, they would weave them in so they couldn’t be seen.
As one can imagine the looms created a great deal of noise. Isabel states: “Of course when OSHA came in they insisted that people had to be offered earplugs so as to preserve their hearing. But you know those people were getting deaf, you could tell they were getting deaf, and they would not wear earplugs. It was up to them, you know, the company did what OSHA required, but you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink!”
Weaving looms. It is not difficult to imagine the racket when a room full of machines like this one were all operating simultaneously. © Woodstock History Center
As for its distribution outlets, the mill had a varied customer base. In addition to selling woolen goods and blankets to the government for the military, the mill also had civilian customers like Sears Roebuck and B. Altmans. Some of the civilian customers ordered custom wool cloth to be manufactured for items such as skirts that would then be matched with the sweaters that were manufactured by their sweater divisions. According to Isabel, “Mr. Sharpe said, “Well, if we’re going to do that [make matching cloth for skirts that match another company’s sweaters), you gotta send us some sweaters. At least enough sweaters for the girls in the office!” Consequently, Isabel and the other workers had many matching outfits.
Bridgewater Mill Store filled with fancy woolens made at the Bridgewater Mill. Note the custom matching outfits on the back wall that were made by the Bridgewater Mill seamstresses. © Woodstock History Center
In addition to manufacturing cloth, the Bridgewater Woolen Mill was set up to create custom clothing. One would go to the mill store, get measured, pick out the cloth and a design, and the seamstresses, who worked in a building that was located on the site of the current Mill Village parking lot, would make up the clothing to order.
The seamstress building was, according to Isabel, “the same type of building as the office building but not quite as substantial... It had been like a boarding house. And the post office was in the front of it, and then the back of it and the upstairs were rooms that the seamstresses worked in.”
Since there was no bank in the town of Bridgewater, the Mill always conducted its business using cash with Isabel serving as the mill’s paymaster. “On payroll days, Mr. Sharpe would take a briefcase with him with a check in it for the payroll, and then on Thursday morning he would go to the [Woodstock National Bank ] at eight o’clock and they brought him in the front door, and he’d give them the check, and they’d hand him the bag of money, and he’d put that in the briefcase, and bring it to Bridgewater, and then I would count it out into the individual pay envelopes. And you know, you’d count out about ten thousand dollars, and you’d end up ten dollars short or five dollars short!”
While Isabel never experienced any issues with theft, about three weeks after she left the mill there was a hold up. She notes that “A guy walked in with a stocking mask on and said he wanted the payroll, and he wanted the money out of the safe, because there were three drawers of money in the safe, three petty cash funds for the different businesses. And there was a lot of money, because it was pay for the week.” The thief was never caught. The police “found the payroll box, and they found the drawers from the safe, but they didn’t find any of the money…. You talk to anybody that lives in Bridgewater and they say, oh, of course we know who did it…”
With regard to Mr. Sharpe, Isabel noted, “He was so nice… [although] he was very standoffish to the mill people. He was the boss.” One anecdote about Mr. Sharpe that Isabel relayed involved a young man who had worked for a short time at the Bridgewater Woolen Mill. She later met the young man again after he had left the Bridgewater Mill and had gotten a job working in Lebanon, New Hampshire. According to Isabel, the man said, “Hey, you knew me at the Bridgewater Mill. I worked there for a few weeks… Mr. Sharpe fired me.” Isabelle replied, “Oh, that’s too bad.” The young man then said, “Well, I’d been out horsing around all night, and in the morning I had such a hangover I called up and said, ‘I feel crummy. I’m not coming in today. I’m going to stay in bed.’” When the young man came in the next day… Mr. Sharpe… asked him to come in the office; he wanted to talk to him. So he went in the office, and Mr. Sharpe told him that he was entirely too young to think that his life depended on drinking and carousing, and that he needed to spend time learning how to do something and do it right. He had quit high school without finishing, and Mr. Sharpe gave him a whole lecture on what he should do for with his life, and then he said, ‘You’re fired.’ Interestingly, the man added, ’You know what? I love that man.’ He said, ’He’s the nicest man I ever knew… He’s the only one that ever cared that I was wasting my life. He gave me the right message… I haven’t done that, called up and said I have a hangover, since then.’”
Post card showing the east side of the Bridgewater Woolen Mill.
As for the mill, its days were numbered. It closed in 1973 following a flood that seriously damaged the structure. The dye room had water right up to the window and the weave room was totally under water.
The machinery in the mill was rental machinery that had been brought in by the owners from a mill in North Billerica. After the flood, the machinery was removed, and the mill closed down.
Isabel Barber’s story about the Bridgewater Woolen Mill is just one of several hundred oral histories in the Woodstock History Center’s collection. Now that COVID has subsided a bit, and we are once again able to safely conduct oral histories, we would like to resume the good work that Virginia Christy, Jean Conklin, Mary Lou Boniface, and so many others have done over the years to preserve the history of our area. If you know someone that has stories to share of the local area, please let us know so that we may contact them.
Isabel Barber. Photo courtesy of Jill Barber Helmer.