More Treasure from the Archives: Dyeing to be Free!
By Carie Good
One current project at the Woodstock History Center is identifying books in our Library and Archives that may be cataloged into a Rare Books Collection. I have in my hand a leather-bound little volume of a first edition published in 1806 and donated to the Ottauquechee Chapter of the DAR by Mrs. E.K. Wright. This one little book greatly impacted the newly-established United States of America and influenced our independence and commerce for over a half a century.
The abridged title is: The Dyer's Companion, in two parts. Part first, containing a general plan of dying wool and woollen, cotton and linen cloths, yarn and thread. Also, directions for milling and finishing, stamping and bleaching cloths… Part second, containing many useful receipts on dying, staining, painting, &c., and many useful discoveries not before made public.
This book was written by Elijah Bemiss, a Dyer from Waterford, Connecticut, and a champion for the rights of American craftsmen. He felt strongly that Americans needed free and easy access to the highly guarded secrets of the dyer’s trade in order to develop true commercial independence from Great Britain. As he reasoned in his preface: “By contributing our mutual aid toward gaining and supporting our independence of Great Britain and other foreign countries, to whom in arts and manufacturers we have too long bowed the knee; we shall promote our own interests and our country’s welfare and glory.” In the center of the book, he makes a further observation: “As a nation, we can never be really independent until we become our own manufacturers of articles of the first necessity. To arrive at this desirable point ought to be our constant endeavor.”
Prior to the Revolutionary War, America shipped her plentiful supply of raw cotton to Britain, where it was spun, woven, dyed and printed and sold back to her as yardage. When the War of Independence was over, Britain’s continuing ban on sharing textile machinery and know-how with the Colonies created a great burden on the young country. In 1806, Europe was still trying to maintain control of the market, and American dyers were often under-trained with recipes selling from master to apprentice "for twenty and thirty dollars each." Which of course in those days was an enormous amount of money. It was to remedy this situation that Elijah Bemiss wrote his book.
Title page of the Dyer’s Companion
Dyeing fibers and cloth is an ancient activity. Humans love color. For thousands of years, people have used the color of their clothes to not only express personal preferences but also status (royal purple) and occupation (British soldiers and their red coats). The art of dying fibers has been traced as far back as 35,000 years, with a fragment of dyed flax found in a prehistoric cave in the Republic of Georgia. A variety of plants, fungi, barks and even insects were used to produce a range of colors for fibers and fabrics. Over time, dyers learned which plants gave better colors than others, and these recipes would have been passed down from generation to generation. As specialized guild workers of the Middle Ages gave way to small locally-based workshops, production of textiles for domestic markets became a staple of local manufacturing. In particular, each workshop or local textile mill developed their own methods and recipes for dye, and 18th-century dye sample books and fabric sample books show a variety of bright vibrant colors. Professional dyers would closely guard these dye recipes from competitors.
Yet Mr. Bemiss freely shares his experience with the dye products and methods of his day, available to both the community’s dyer shop and home worker alike. His recipes are an indication of the tremendous volume of business he handled at his shop in Connecticut, and his personal dedication to high standards. He studied all the sources of dye and writes about them in detail, even the cultivation of important species.
The recipes included in the manual are for quantities of cloth – usually twenty pounds. He tells how to construct the vats and gives the necessary equipment needed to set up a dyeing establishment. For the hobbyist today with only basic equipment, his instructions are mind boggling. He starts his treatise on indigo: “For a vat of twelve barrels fill the vat about half full of water, scalding hot; dissolve eight pounds of potash lie… five pounds of madder, and four quarts of wheat bran; heat this with a moderate fire, nearly to boiling heat, often stirring it – turn this into the vat. Take five pounds of indigo, wet it with one gallon of the potash lie, and grind it well.” Mr. Bemiss further continues, but we are stopped with the complexity. One thing we can remember is that the vat should look green to be right for dyeing blue.
And Mr. B. cannot be accused of omitting any information about his procedure with preparing and cleaning the wool for this vat. He goes into detail about the scouring: “A man,” he says, “can scour a bale of wool a day” – and a bale is two hundred-fifty pounds. Sixty pounds will be lost in the scouring. Now to scour this bale, “take eighteen pails of water and six pails of fermented sig (urine) and twenty pounds of wool and boil this for fifteen minutes.” How to avoid becoming overcome with the stench is only casually mentioned.
It should be pointed out that fermented urine is mentioned in many other 18th-century receipt books for scouring wool. Glancing through the back pages of old recipes for dyers, one may find a recipe for beer when urine was needed. Beer stimulated (shall we say) a quick source of supply. Naturally, Bemiss' book also includes recipes for beer and mead as well as brandy, cider and wine.
He has words, too, for bleaching out cotton. Would we wish our cloth white? He instructs us to put the wetted and soaped cloth in a tight room. Next, “six pounds of sulphur in vessels holding half a pound each are then set fire.” After six or eight hours of this treatment the cloth is as white as “India shirting.” Easy.
As we can see, natural dyeing was a complicated, time consuming, and usually smelly process. No wonder then, that when the first synthetic dye was accidentally discovered while researching a cure for malaria in the mid-19th century, a new industry was born. Eventually, the old natural dyes lost popularity in favor of “modern,” synthetic recipes, along with the mechanization of weaving, spinning and the demand for consistent, reproducible fabrics, patterns and colors. The commercial use of natural dyes disappeared, the textile industry jump started the Industrial Revolution, and Bemis’s book was no longer in demand.
Today, Bemiss's work is still important for seeing the exact methods of natural dyeing and understanding the life of the dyer in the early nineteenth century. But in 1806, this book opened wide the door for New England’s young, booming textile business, and is a serious glimpse into what was once a complicated and professional craft. Perhaps even Mr. Dewey’s mill of Quechee, or the Bridgewater Mill, where B. F. Southgate began producing cotton yarns in 1828, relied on their copy of Elijah Bemiss’ The Dyer’s Companion as their most important reference tool.