They wore wool year-round in P.E.I.'s Bygone Days

Reginald "Dutch" Thompson's column The Bygone Days brings you the voices of Island seniors, many of whom are now long-departed. These tales of the way things used to be offer a fascinating glimpse into the past. Every second weekend CBC P.E.I. will bring you one of Dutch's columns. 

Shopping has become a form of entertainment to some nowadays, but in P.E.I.'s bygone days a century or more ago shopping — especially for finished goods like clothing — was a rare event. 

Islanders made most of their clothing themselves, even weaving the woolen cloth from sheep they or their neighbours raised. They knit, crocheted, felted and wove everything from underwear to suiting to hats. 

Dozens of small woolen mills were scattered across P.E.I. to serve their local communities, and were one of the meeting places in those communities. Now, only one of those original mills remains — MacAusland's Woolen Mill in Bloomfield — as well as more recent additions Belfast Mini Mills and Fleece and Harmony Woolen Mill, also in Belfast.

Christie Isabelle Johnston was born in 1910 in Long River near New London. Her father was a blacksmith and her mother worked for seven summers — before Johnston was born — carding wool in nearby Johnstone's woolen mill.

"They put the wool into a certain machine and then it came out in rolls, and she'd have to gather up the rolls and put them in like a little bundle," Johnston said. Her mother wasn't paid much at the mill but money went much further back then, Johnston said. 

After the Johnstones, the Paynters ran the mill, she said, and it was still in operation when she was a girl. People came from as far away as Cavendish by horse and wagon to deliver their wool to the mill, and then either wait or return to pick up the two-foot long rolls of smooth, carded wool they could easily spin by hand into yarn.

Johnston recalled her mother spinning her own yarn, and said she tried her own hand at it a few times too. 

Most people had sheep in those days, but when her family tried to keep a couple of sheep, "they jumped every fence they came to," she said with a laugh.

"They even tied them together, and they jumped the fence together!" 

'She had a nice loom'

In the eastern P.E.I. seaport of Annandale, Jimmy Banks describes being a young lad more than 100 years ago.

Banks told Dutch that farmers would charge items like tea, sugar and molasses at the local store throughout the year, and in the fall they'd come from miles around to sell their produce to schooners heading to Newfoundland and Cape Breton. If they were lucky, that would pay off their bill at the store. 

"There'd be some clothing have to be bought, like work clothing — the stores [would] carry work overalls and things like that," Banks said. "But the older people, most of them made their own clothing." 

Banks said they wove a rough fabric called drugget and made suits, dresses and even underwear. Drugget lasted a long time, he said. 

"My mother done a lot of weaving in her day — she had a nice loom, and I used to help her set up," Banks said. She wove cotton with wool into blankets, and was paid by the yard of woven fabric. "Tremendous amount of work for the bit of money you were getting," he said. 

Weaving wool by candlelight

Bertha Ross was born in 1911 and grew up on a farm in Montague where her parents raised sheep.

Dutch talked to Ross when she was 95, and she told him "everything was manufactured at home. And of course in my grandmother's day, I think the sewing machine came into being — everything was sewn by hand before that." Ross eventually inherited that Singer sewing machine.

"She'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and light candles and weave, before any of the family was up," Ross said of her grandmother.

"She had a loom, and that loom was at home for a long time. I don't know whatever happened to it."  

Her family sheared the wool every year, and got it carded at Morson's mill in Upton, near Bridgetown she said. 

Ross's mother spun her own yarn and got another woman in their district to weave blankets from it. The loom was about a yard wide, she said, so they'd sew two lengths together to make a blanket. 

"There was always a seam down the middle of our blankets in those days," she said.

Ross recalled drugget wool being used to make dresses, pants and suits.

"It was the homespun, home-woven," she said. "I guess it would wear forever, but it must have been awfully hot in the summer. But you got used to it."

Her father would also wear his Stanfield's wool underwear all summer, she said.

"That's what they wore in those days!" 

Wool underwear year-round 

Ambrose Monaghan grew up on a farm in Kelly's Cross in the 1910s. The Monaghans had eight or 10 sheep, which were sheared by his mother Lizzie and his aunt Janet.

The women would wash and dry the wool at home and take it by horse and cart to French's Mill where it was carded or combed. 

"My old aunt used to do all the spinning, she'd walk across the kitchen with the thread, and the spinning wheel going," Ambrose said. Then the women would knit or weave anything the family needed. 

Ambrose told Dutch his father Jimmy Rosie Monaghan wore the long woolen underwear they made all year long, while making hay or threshing grain in the heat of summer. 

Dutch recalled his own grandfather also always wore woollen underwear, winter and summer, with his collar and shirt cuffs buttoned tight in case a little sunlight got through the Stanfield's long johns. He claimed the wool absorbed the sweat — but Dutch said he did wonder if he would have sweat so much if he wasn't wearing wool underwear.

The name Stanfield's is practically synonymous in Canada with long underwear. Did you know that the Nova Scotia company actually began in P.E.I.? Charles Stanfield and his brother-in-law Samuel E. Dawson founded the Tryon Woolen Mills in Tryon in 1856, according to the company's website. A decade later Stanfield moved to Nova Scotia and in 1870 began Truro Woolen Mills, the first factory of its kind in Canada.

Woolen mills disappeared from the P.E.I. landscape as the era of home knitting came to a gradual close in the 1900s, notes P.E.I. author JoDee Samuelson in her publication The Watermills Of Prince Edward Island. Although the Tryon Woolen Mills, powered by steam, temporarily found a niche knitting undergarments for soldiers during the First World War, the demand for woolen products was on the decline. The mill burned in 1920, and the mill pond was finally drained in the 1980s. 

"Cotton was in, wool was out, so farmers stopped raising sheep," Samuelson writes. 

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