Written by M. Kat Anderson. Edited by Eric Engles.
Wandering around Antigua, Guatemala in 1987 while attending language school, I came across a woman sitting on the ground weaving on a backstrap loom. Cords at one end of the loom were tied around a tree and those at the other end were tied around her waist. She could easily adjust the tension of the loom by moving toward or away from the living anchor of the tree. Taking shape in the loom was a rectangle of cloth woven in strands of sumptuous hues.
My eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to this scene of beauty. I watched the weaver’s agile hands move the weft rhythmically back and forth across the loom to create the cloth. In her traditional colorful dress, she seemed a natural part of the landscape. It was the first time I had ever given my attention to the process of weaving—of creating a sheet of textile from linear strands of thread. I was fascinated, full of a sense that I was reconnecting with something hidden deep inside. I wanted very much to buy one of the weaver’s finished pieces. Looking through the stack set on a mat beside her, I chose a huipil—a colorfully woven and embroidered cotton blouse.
History of Textiles
Weaving cloth has been an integral part of human culture for tens of thousands of years. Textile technology, says textile scholar E.J.W. Barber, “is older than pottery or metallurgy” and very likely pre-dates agriculture. Long before humans began cultivating plants for food and fiber, they were gathering wild plants with long, durable fibers in their stems that could be twisted or braided together to make cordage. Textile making developed naturally out of cordage-making and used the same fundamental skills—of extracting fibers from plants and “spinning” them into thread.
Because of the great utility of textiles and the near-universal availability of spinnable fibers from wild plants and animals, weaving and textile-making were likely widespread across most human cultures—including those of the Western Hemisphere—before the beginning of formal agriculture in the Near East about 10,000 years ago. Citing the numerous plant-fiber artifacts (mats, wall hangings, blankets, flexible bags, shirts, shawls, skirts, and sashes) discovered at the oldest archaeological sites in Eastern Europe, archeologists J.M. Adovasio and David Pedler conclude that “perishable technologies must have accompanied the first travelers to the New World.” Cloth is highly perishable, however, and its preservation in archeological sites rare, so our knowledge of its prehistoric making and use is limited. With objects made of stone, bone, ceramics, and metal dominating the archaeological record, the importance of textiles to human history has been slow to be acknowledged and appreciated.
Textiles have been made (and continue to be made) from a wide variety of plant and animal fibers, including cotton, jute, hemp, silk, and wool. Among the most extensively used plant fibers are those from members of the genus Linum, or flax. Flax fibers come from the stem of the flax plant; the cloth made from them is called linen. The oldest textile in the archaeological record—recovered from a 30,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic cave in the Republic of Georgia—is made of braided, knotted, and dyed fibers derived from wild flax (Linum bienne). Articles made of wild flax have also been found at 29,000-year-old Moravian archeological sites in the Czech Republic.
Domesticated Flax
Some 10,000 years ago, people living in the area of present-day southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, the so-called “cradle of agriculture,” domesticated several wild plant species that had previously only been gathered from the natural landscape. Over a long period of cultivating the plants and choosing seeds from individuals with the most desirable characteristics, they developed the crops that make up what archaeologists have dubbed “the package.” These earliest of domesticated crops were einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chickpea—and common flax (Linum usitatissimum). Flax was valued not only for its fiber, but also for its seeds, which could be eaten by humans and livestock and from which a useful oil (linseed) could be extracted. Cultivation of common flax spread from the Fertile Crescent to India, China, northern Europe, and all over the Mediterranean region. Fiber from common flax was used to make the clothing worn by priests in the kingdoms of ancient Egypt and to make the linen sails of the Roman Empire’s trading vessels and warships.
Over the many thousands of years during which common flax was cultivated in Eurasia, farmers selected for longer stems (when the plant was grown for fiber) and for larger seeds (when the crop was destined for oil and feed). By the time Europeans began to colonize faraway lands in the 1500s, common flax had the very long stems we see today and was widely considered an essential crop. Since European society was still largely agrarian, many people at this time had some direct experience of flax—growing it, processing it for fiber, spinning the fiber into thread, weaving the thread into linen, or making clothing and household items from linen fabric. As a descendent of flax-growing Europeans (French, Irish, and Scots) I claim this cultural tradition as a core part of my heritage.
Flax and Linen in Early America
When Europeans began to establish permanent settlements in North America, the colonists were sure to bring with them all the essentials they believed the “wilderness” of North America could not provide: fowl, cattle, swine, iron tools, various manufactured goods, and crop seeds. Although the indigenous people living in North America had been using various wild plants—species of wild flax among them—as sources of fiber for cordage and textiles for thousands of years, the colonists carried with them the seeds of common flax so that they would have a raw material for spinning thread and weaving textiles.
The growing of flax started with the first settlements in Jamestown, Virginia and Plymouth, Massachusetts. Flax spinning and weaving quickly became common household industries in these and later settlements. A spinning-wheel and distaff wound with flax sat in the corner of many a colonial kitchen. The importance of the industry was early recognized and carefully fostered by legislation. The Massachusetts General Assembly passed an Act to encourage the family production of flax as early as 1640, and similar laws were subsequently enacted in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and other states.
One of the earliest accounts we have of the growing of flax in the colonies occurs in the 1621 book by Edward William entitled Virgo Truimphans. Here, both flax and hemp appear on a list of crops being grown as commodities in the colony of Virginia. In 1682, mapmaker Joel Gascoyne put flax and “linen cloth” on a list of staple commodities in Carolina along with wine, oil, silk, hides, wool, tallow, honey, beeswax, tobacco, hemp, pitch, tar, cordage, and masts for shipping.
The journals of some of some noted explorers and naturalists such as Peter Kalm and Luigi Castiglioni contain references to white settlers growing flax for domestic use and for commercial purposes in the fertile valleys of Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and other states during the 1700s. “The people spin and weave a great part of their every-day apparel and dye it in their houses,” Kalm wrote of the community of Raccoon, New Jersey in 1748. “Flax is cultivated by many people and succeeds very well.”
Through the 1700s and into the early 1800s, flax was an important part of American culture and a cornerstone of community. If a household didn’t grow its own flax, it likely possessed the looms, spinning wheels, and spindles needed for spinning and weaving the flax fibers grown nearby. If you could peek into an average American home, you would see a surprisingly broad range of household items made of linen: curtains, chair seats, tablecloths, placemats, doilies, blankets, sheets, towels, and clothing.
The growth of cities and the slowly accelerating process of industrialization began to have an impact on flax production beginning around 1800. A key event was the invention of the cotton gin, which allowed a vast scaling-up of cotton fiber production. Using the labor of enslaved African people, cotton plantations grew in size and number, producing so much cotton so cheaply that people no longer saw the need to engage in labor-intensive flax production.
By the mid-1800s, flax growing had waned nearly everywhere. Writing in 1847, William Darlington summed up the changed status of flax:
[T]his valuable plant—once considered so indispensable among the crops of our farmer—is now but little cultivated. I have not seen a flax patch for a number of years, whereas in the ‘good old times’—before Spinning Wheels were superseded by Pianos—every rural family cultivated and manufactured as much flax as was required for domestic purposes.
Though flax cultivation had mostly vanished by the early part of the 1900s, it survived in cultural memory and people remembered it nostalgically. In 1929, Franklin Gorin wrote of the passing of the flax era in Barren County, Kentucky (where some of my ancestors lived):
Flax was also grown to a considerable extent for many years. Flax and tow linen added much to the commerce of the [Barren] county. After clothing the whites and blacks, much was sent by the merchants, who bartered for it any of their merchandise, to Lexington, and after the trade was changed to Louisville, to that place. Those were the good old days of the big and little spinning wheel.
If it weren’t for the efforts of a distant cousin, my connection to this flax-growing past would be only hypothetical. This cousin, William Samuel Terry, IV, discovered that my great, great aunt Nettie Depp, born in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1874, wrote prolifically during her extraordinary-for-the-time career as a schoolteacher, principal, and superintendent of schools. Terry unearthed many of these writings and used them as the basis of a biography. In one passage direct from her own pen, Aunt Nettie wrote for her students about a visit to her great aunt Mariba Ewing’s house:
Ah, how I should like to spend a whole week there, and search around and see the old heirlooms…there was the old loom house, with its broad fireplace, nice loom three little flax wheels, (and she gave me one of them which I prize very highly), reels and everything that goes, with the work of spinning and weaving. And children, I think I have told you about the pretty silk dresses my great aunts spun and wove when they were girls. Well, this was the loom that did the work.
In reading this passage, I realized that I was peering back to the end of a rich tradition—one that my ancestors had carried with them from Europe to America. My relatives were in the United States not long after the first English settlements. My great, great, great, great, great grandfather William Depp moved from Virginia to Kentucky in 1792, the year it became the fifteenth state, and settled on Skagg’s Creek near the mouth of Nobob Creek. He probably came by way of the Cumberland Gap over the Wilderness Road, following an old Indian trail that was steep, rough, and narrow, and could only be traveled by foot or horseback. He established the family of which Nettie was a part and probably started cultivating flax at his new home.
I grew especially interested in these strands of my heritage—the practices connected with gathering plants and creating things with them—because over four generations the strands have become frayed but not completely severed. My Barren County female relatives probably learned from childhood how to spin and weave out of necessity, as there were no fabric stores in the early days with bolts of fabric to choose from. I imagine these ancestors spinning fiber as they watched the children, or spinning by candlelight during winter evenings.
I had grown up with European fairytales—like Rumpelstiltskin and Sleeping Beauty—in which spinning wheels are key props in the plot. These allegories didn’t really hit home and apply to my own life until I found out more about my ancestors’ everyday lives and household activities. I have linen doilies and rolls of lace from my great grandmother, sister to my aunt Nettie, that I cherish in part because I now have a sense of what went into their creation.
Unlike the portable backstrap loom of the Guatemalan weaver I met in the eighties, the looms of my ancestors were stationary, large, and vertical. That’s why Mariba Ewing’s loom needed its own house! Mariba’s loom provided a larger weaving area, allowing for more intricate designs and variety of techniques.
I am sad not to know more about the spinning and weaving activities of my ancestors, or their cultivation and harvest of flax. But what the roots of my weaving and plant-gathering heritage lack in historical detail I can make up for in direct personal experience today.
Reviving Traditions: Chico Flax
The important role that flax played in American culture only five or six generations ago has been almost completely erased from our collective memories. But a handful of people are working hard to revive the vibrant and grounded culture surrounding the cultivation and use of flax. Among these people are Sandy Fisher and Durl Van Alstyne of Chico, California. Sandy and Durl are rebuilding the old flax traditions, bringing them back “one thread at a time” through flax farming, demonstrations, classes, harvest events, and flax products.
As a veteran weaver of 35 years, Sandy has always had an appreciation for the beauty, durability, and utility of natural fibers. She and Durl began working with flax ten years ago, when they envisioned a business in which they could be involved in the entire process leading to finished linen products—growing flax, processing it with hand tools, spinning the fibers into thread, weaving linen fabric, and sewing the fabric into jackets, cowls, bedspreads, and tablecloths.
The mission of their enterprise, called Chico Flax, is “piloting regenerative agriculture production and processing systems for fiber flax in our region, bringing a new industry and social enterprise to Northern California in collaboration with local community members, farmers, artisans and institutions.” Chico Flax is at present the only commercial supplier of domestically produced flax material in the United States.
In 2017, Chico Flax harvested the first crop planted at its permanent location. Sandy and Durl had to develop their own processing techniques because there were none to emulate. They revived many of the hand tools that were used in colonial America. These special hand tools, invented long ago and used for centuries, worked so well that Sandy and Durl now use them in their own business and in workshops, designed to teach others interested in growing and processing flax.
Chico Flax is a member of Fibershed, a nonprofit organization started by executive director Rebecca Burgess in 2010. Fibershed borrows its name from a concept that, like foodshed, derives from the word watershed. A fibershed is a locality or region in which clothing is made from fibers that originate in that region. In Burgess’s conception, the fibershed concept emphasizes the “connectivity among all parts” of the system, “from soil to skin and back to soil.”
With a dozen others I visited Sandy and Durl’s farm in Chico, California to participate in a workshop in April. Going out into the field to harvest flax, we are instructed to “pull, never cut, the stems” to preserve their maximum length (about three feet). We gather the stems into bundles around which you can wrap your thumb and forefinger. We spend the better part of the morning and early afternoon, before it gets too hot, pulling and bundling the flax stalks. Doing this work, I think about my ancestors, who grew this plant in Kentucky and almost certainly used their hands as I am using mine.
At the end of the day, Sandy and Durl explain what happens next: the bundles are hung up to dry for about two weeks. Then the seeds are removed by passing the heads of the stalks through a coarse comb called a ripple. These seeds will be used for replanting. The stalks are then retted—submerged in 100-gallon stock tanks for about a week so that bacteria can break down the sticky pectin that holds the useful fibers to the inner stem. The stems are removed from the tanks and hung outside to dry for five or more days. After they are completely dry, the bundles can keep for years in the barn.
On another occasion, at a course offered through Fibershed’s Learning Center in Point Reyes Station, I and other students joined Sandy and Durl again to work with flax stalks that have been retted and dried. We each take a bundle of flax straw and put it through a tool called a flax break, which crushes, loosens, and breaks the coarse, brittle outer covering of the stalks without severing the pliable, tough flax fibers. Then we separate the fibers from the straw in a step called scutching: we place the stems on a scutching board and draw a blunt wooden knife over the flax stems to remove most of the crushed stalks that stick to the fibers. Finally, we run the bundle through a hackle, a comb made of closely spaced iron nails that separate the long fibers from the short, fluffy tow. Only then is the flax ready to spin into thread. Each step refines the straw more and more, and when the bundle is ready for spinning it feels and looks like soft, thick human hair.
Participating in this process directly, using my hands, eyes, and body, I feel more connected than ever to my ancestors, who I realize were active collaborators in the creation of culture. They built on folk traditions handed down through their French and Scots-Irish ancestors to make the things they needed for living. Their time contrasts so sharply with ours, where fashion and everything else that makes up our fast culture is invented and made for us and disseminated by the internet, social media, television, and movies.
Sandy and Durl are inspiring to be around. You can see that they are absolutely committed to rebuilding the networks that used to connect each step in the clothing creation process: growing, harvesting, processing, making, and wearing. They are reconnecting the interdependent players—farmer, miller, spinner, weaver, artisan, and wearer—reviving a model that can apply to food as well and which has the potential to restore much of what we’ve lost in becoming isolated consumers.
“For most of our existence we were makers, not consumers,” says Episcopal priest and theologian Matthew Fox. Fox points out that by examining the artifacts and artwork found at ancient sites archaeologists can determine how humans lived in prehistory. “As humans,” says Fox, “it is of our very nature to create.”
Clothing Made from Linen is Environmentally Friendly
I adore my linen dresses. In the hot, dry climate of California’s Central Valley, their lightweight fabric breathes and keeps me cool. I hand wash them and hang them to dry. Then I spray them with water from a spray bottle to soften the wrinkles. I never have to worry about one day looking in my closet and finding them falling apart, no matter how much I wear them.
My little-worn synthetic clothing is a different story. One day I examined some of the several-years-old pieces, in fashionable browns, blacks, and whites, and noticed they had begun to disintegrate, as if someone had taken scissors to them. I read the label on one blouse: it was made of polyurethane and polyester. Into the trash the most deteriorated of the garments went. I knew that in the landfill they would shed microplastics and I regretted buying them in the first place. I resolved to be a wiser consumer and avoid clothing made of synthetic, fossil-fuel-derived fiber, which still makes up more than half of global garment production.
Sometimes making more sustainable choices means making sacrifices, but that’s not the case with clothing. Fashion designer and editor Lucianne Tonti insists that sustainability in choice of garments is entirely consistent with valuing beauty and desire. “[I]t’s the clothes we love,” Tonti says, “that we take the best care of, that we keep forever.”
To learn more about micro-plastics pollution go to https://www.5gyres.org/publications