New Perspectives on the American Silk Industry: Silk Products and Silk Manufacture in America.

 

 

         A four paper panel

 

 

The American silk industry was at one time the largest in the world. Yarns for many purposes, knitted goods, woven and printed fabrics of all qualities were made by U.S. mills. Today, faded into history and little regarded, American silk receives scant attention.

 

Using Japanese raw silk, the scale and scope of late 19th and early 20th century American silk manufacturing was far removed from anything imagined by Colonial or post-Revolutionary artisans as they labored to use locally produced silk.

 

In the early 19th century Congress encouraged the idea of silk manufacture. Sericulture schemes and efforts to engineer efficient thread making machinery began in the late 1820s. Gradually the entire silk thread making and silk weaving process was mechanized.

 

The papers in this panel present research on four U.S. silk manufacturers.  They address company histories and their various products, from sericulture and pioneering thread for sewing machines, through threads manufactured for weaving to the production of fine quality plain staple silks and sophisticated novelty prints

 

From small industry beginnings in the 1830s through decline in the 1920s and collapse in the 1950s, the individual mills operated for various periods of years. Their stories encapsulate the U.S silk industry--the products, the geographic spread, and the range of factors at play, from protectionism to immigration, from raw material imports to engineering innovations. This Silk Road begins to recover a forgotten American achievement.