The Merchants' Manufacturer: the Barrett Family's Dyeing Businesses

The Merchants’ Manufacturer: The Barrett Family’s Dyeing Businesses in Massachusetts and New York, 1790-1850 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Thorsen, Linda Jean. 2015. The Merchants’ Manufacturer: The Barrett Family’s Dyeing Businesses in Massachusetts and New York, 1790-1850. Master's thesis, Harvard University, Extension School. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37367547 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Merchants’ Manufacturer: The Barrett Family’s Dyeing Businesses in Massachusetts and New York, 1790-1850 Linda Jean Thorsen A Thesis in the Field of History for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies Harvard University May 2015 Copyright © 2015 Linda Thorsen Abstract This work explores the nature and evolution of the independent dyeing service industry in the early United States through a case study of the Barrett companies in Malden, Massachusetts and in Staten Island, New York from the 1790s to 1850. I analyze published and unpublished sources to answer basic questions about this little-studied industry and these businesses in particular: How did they operate? What factors influenced their opportunities, challenges, and successes? What was the relationship of the dyeing service industry to merchants and to textile factories in New England? And how did the fortunes of the businesses and the family change over time? Beginning in the 1790s, new trade opportunities for American merchants drove increases in imports of cloth from Europe and the East Indies, which in turn expanded opportunities for urban dyers to help merchants and households refurbish or repurpose valuable cloth, clothing, and household goods. Merchants engaged dyeing services— which involved coloring with natural dyes, and also bleaching, cleaning, and cloth finishing—to add value to goods that were faded, shopworn, dirty, or had been damaged in shipping. Men and women in elite or middling households, as well as businesses such as hotels, also used these services to transform their used clothes and furnishings into new and fashionable ones, avoiding the cost of new cloth. To meet the needs of elite customers, dyers worked with a wide range of fabrics and needed to produce colors and finishes matching or at least approaching the quality of imported cloth. In the first decades of the nineteenth century especially, these dyers were held to a high standard and needed a wider array of skills than did New England’s industrializing cloth manufacturers, who could limit their scope. Knowledge transfer by traveling European dyers along with the dissemination of print materials helped American dyers enter the trade and keep up with European dyeing and finishing processes, while improvements in transportation and communication helped expand their customer reach. Having little to do with American textile manufacturers, independent dyers’ interests were closely aligned with those of their merchant customers. In addition to facilitating dyers’ expansion and publicity, merchants took advantage of dyeing and later printing to reduce their risk, improve profitability of their import/export ventures, and influence tariff policy in their favor. But it was the steady custom in household dyeing that in fact drove day-to-day profits for dyers and ultimately subsidized the reduction of merchant risk. Profits and prices were highest from 1800 to 1820, declining gradually in the following decades due to increasing competition and to diverse other factors including the decline in prices of cloth and clothing. The skilled dyeing workforce was paid well and resisted deskilling. As the capital needed to start a dyeing business declined, some employees quit and became competitors, contributing to saturation of the market in the 1840s. Beyond exposing one aspect of early nineteenth-century material culture and illuminating challenges facing a little-known industry’s business owners and workers, this study complicates our understanding of how merchant capital influenced industrialization. First, some merchants navigated the transforming political economy not only by investing in manufacturing, but also by choosing industries that fostered profit in their import/export activities. Second, import substitution industrialization took multiple forms during this period, some of which benefited merchants more than canonical producers such as the New England textile manufacturers. “I send this dress to Hancock, the dyer way down town It looks quite rough and frumpy, let him extract the brown, And color it a little green, or Mazarenish blue; I shall expect to see it home as bright and fresh as new. But do not send the package, as you have done, by Express, The charge is quite a sum, and they never will take less….” — Fragment of a letter in verse cataloging numerous errands given to the beleaguered writer by her friends. From “Our Dead Letter Office,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, August 1846 (Philadelphia: Louis Godey, 1846), Web, Accessible Archives. About the Author Born in 1955 in Camden, New Jersey, Linda Thorsen holds a B.A. in English Literature from Swarthmore College and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Beginning her career in 1978 as a writer of tutorials and user guides for Massachusetts software companies, she later managed writers, developed marketing materials, and worked as a product manager, product marketing manager, and marketing consultant. In the 2000s, she left full-time corporate employment to pursue freelance writing, scholarship, and teaching. She and her husband have lived in Malden, Massachusetts since 1989. vi To Mark vii Acknowledgements I am grateful to the many archivists who helped me find materials and shared their knowledge, especially Peter Nelson, Christina Barber, and their colleagues at the Amherst College Archives; Cara Dellatte at the Staten Island Museum; the staff of The Staten Island Historical Society / Historic Richmondtown library and archive; the Staff of the Baker Library Historical Collections at Harvard University; Dora St. Martin and Steve Nedell at the Malden Public Library; and the officers and board of the Malden Historical Society. I thank Jim Cunningham of Save Our Heritage and Colonel James Barrett Farm for the delightful opportunity to meet descendants of William Barrett. The ALM program at the Harvard University Extension School has, for a modest consideration, provided a space within which I could learn a great deal about United States history without ignoring the rest of the globe. It also facilitated my studies as a Special Student in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Many thanks are due to Peter O’Malley, Sarah Powell, and Chuck Houston in the ALM office and to Patrick O’Brien in the Special Student office for their support and for helping me navigate Harvard’s administrative requirements. To Noelani Arista I am grateful for conversations about history and for dragging me to the 2008 conference that first brought me in contact with the History of Capitalism community at Harvard. I have learned a great deal from all my instructors, teaching assistants, fellow students, and the students I taught. Though the ALM program does not have a “cohort,” I viii have found fellow students and teaching assistants with whom to discuss my work and the challenges it posed. Special thanks are due to Lesley Ogorodnik, Mary DeLong, David Nicholson, Ann Giannangeli, Ashley Pollock, Gail Gardner, Bob Goggin, and the many other students I met in the monthly meetings for thesis writers. I have learned much from numerous doctoral students in History, American Civilization / American Studies, and African-American Studies who, as fellow students, teaching assistants, and workshop organizers, inspired and encouraged me, including Caitlin Rosenthal, Gloria Whiting, Bryant Etheridge, Eli Cook, Rudi Batzell, Sean Nichols, Kathryn Boodry, and many others. The Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, led by faculty members Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, introduced me to a vocabulary, a literature, and a set of questions that are fascinating in their complexity and critically important not only to our understanding of the past, but also to the future of the United States and humanity. I am particularly grateful to them for helping me come up the learning curve, tolerating my sometimes naïve questions, supporting my first research in this domain, and exposing me to a vibrant community of scholars around the world. Their encouragement and welcome has meant more to me than words can express. Each of the thirteen courses I took for credit—and others I audited—expanded my knowledge and skill, teaching me a little more about history, scholarship, and life. I am especially grateful to Nadine Weidman, whose Advanced Analytical Reasoning in the Social Sciences provided grounding in historical methods and sparked my fascination with the early nineteenth century. She later helped me gain valuable experience as a teaching assistant. I am grateful for her ongoing support and friendship. ix Each day I am thankful for Sally Hadden’s 2007 Harvard Summer School course in the History of the Old South, which gave me crucial perspective on nineteenth century U.S. economy and society. That course and Rachel St. John’s History of the American West provided two important vantage points from which to examine American history. Along with the Workshop in the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, Sven Beckert’s History of American Capitalism provided a helpful survey and an inspirational instructional example. Vincent Brown’s proseminar in Colonial and Revolutionary America was a supportive introduction to the range of historical discourse, while Annette Gordon-Reed’s Jeffersonian America expanded my grasp of Early American politics. In Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s History of the American Family, I began clumsily to put the Barretts’ story on paper.

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