Silk Industry in America- Paterson, N.J. Part 1
This article comes from an 1889 history of New Jersey's Leading Cities. It describes the silk industry in America, and in particular in Paterson, New Jersey, which became the center of U.S. production, employing about 14,000 people in the late 1800's. In the early 20th century the industry was plagued with labor problems and never recovered. This account describes the founders of the silk industry in America, as well as many of the obstacles they needed to overcome.
Part 2 of Silk Industry in America article
A silk weaver nurturing a white mulberry sapling, a cotton spinner planting a cotton seed, would fit emblems of the spirit of Paterson, now and agone, for as, at one time, the prosperity of Paterson depended upon the thrift of the cotton crop, so now its principal industry rests upon the silk-work culture, and it is upon the leaves of the white mulberry, Morus alba, that feeds the germs Bombyx, the most prized of all the Bombycidae or silk-work family; from the delicate threads it spins about itself on passing into the chrysalis state being woven those lustrous fabrics, known and admired since the oldest antiquity.
For years the world was told that silk could not be successfully made in America, there was not the skill, wages were too high. How could America compete with Lyons, with Macclesfield? Now and then a spasmodic attempt was made here and there to found the industry, but only in a small way. In 1825, and for some years succeeding, there was a craze to race the Morus multicandus, a species of mulberry tree on which some silk-worms feed. This was to be the beginning of the silk industry in America, out of which multitudes were to grow rich. In its smaller way it resembled the tulip mania and the South Sea Bubble, because everyone concerned lost money. This was the climax! There was no use trying any more to establish a silk industry on these shores! So said the illuminati and the skeptics; all that was left for us to send our gold across seas in exchange for silks at high figures.
Disproving Skeptical Assertions.
There would seem to have been some men yet unconvinced that silk could not be manufactured in America. They believed it could be done – and they did it. Paterson was the seat of the original venture, a venture, be it said, that was discountenanced at home as well as laughed at abroad. It has outlived Macclesfield many years, that great center of England's silk industry going to the wall at the introduction of free trade, and to-day the city by the great falls is the center of the silk industry in America, its fabrics are world-famed, and in the roaring of its waters may be heard an ominous sound, a sound filled with warning to the French silk mills, that soon America will need few, if any, of their products. Already, as will be proved further along by official statistics, the Paterson silk mills alone are giving employment to more that fourteen thousand persons...
Struggling Against Prejudice.
It is rather a curious phase of our native silk manufacture, that, even when the necessary skill was finally attained and the material turned out of superior quality, there was yet something wanting to make it a sell – a foreign trade-mark. Indeed the prejudice against domestic silk goods was for years so strong that quality for quality, the French would sell quickly while the native was almost a drug in the market at greatly reduced figures. Some manufacturers, following the English, German and French practices along the South American coast of counterfeiting American trade marks, the better to sell their iron and cotton goods, put French labels on their silks for native consumption which then sold readily, often bringing a higher price that the genuine French goods.