University of Guelph thesis template - Atrium - University of Guelph

cloth with the customer such as thread count, width, length, fibre, weave structure, pattern,
colour, purpose, payment and date of completion as a give-and-take negotiation of what the
customer could afford and what Campbell could produce and still make a living. In this
imaginary recording, the sound quality is audible enough to hear the customer’s name and what
they ordered, but the nitty gritty of production, the motivation for purchasing and the ultimate
purpose for the cloth are the crackly parts of the recording requiring conjecture and corroboration
from other primary sources.
In the age of factory-cloth production, the survival of skilled handloom weavers like
Campbell depended on their ability to distance themselves from centres of mechanized cloth
production. 4
French, Dutch and Belgian handloom weavers were pulled to Scotland in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to enrich the domestic Scottish weaving industry. Scottish
handloom weavers, now overpopulated in the mid-nineteenth century due to the successes of
their industry, were pushed and pulled in the early-nineteenth century to regions with an
underdeveloped textile tradition such as the United States and Canada, where handloom
weaving, if it existed, was often pared down to the basics. 5
As with all specialized crafts,
weaving in its complex state requires a cohort of specialists who disseminate knowledge, master
4 Mohanty, Labor and Laborers of the Loom,166.
5 In Chapter Three, I discuss the two divisions of North American handloom weavers: the skilled artisan who wove as part of their
livelihood and the less technically accomplished weaver who mostly wove for their own household consumption. In some regions
such as New York State, there were fewer skilled artisans and as such most handloom weaving was done by semi-skilled weavers.
An exception to this is in Pennsylvania, where a large concentration of trained immigrant German weavers kept the tradition
strong and resembling the tradition in Germany with a stratified system of male weavers and female spinners and finishers. See
Adrienne Hood, The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 106.
4