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History of Silk in Vermont When one thinks of farming in Vermont, one tends to think of sheep and dairy cows. Surprisingly, however, in the early 1800s there was a significant commercial effort made to raise silkworms here! Like other New England states at that time, the Vermont legislature enacted a bounty on silk to encourage a cottage industry for "women who had nothing better to do"! (yes, it really says that in the documents). In 1835, the state paid residents ten cents for each pound for cocoons raised here. Keep in mind, this was a "bounty", so it was paid by the state on top of whatever the silkworm raiser earned by selling the cocoons to the textile industry. Just the same, it doesn't seem like much when you consider that it takes about 4000 cocoons to generate 1 pound of silk! Yet in a diary kept by the Rev. Seth Shaler Arnold of Westminster, VT (1809-1871), a detailed account of his life indicates that with the bounty he received for raising silkworms, he earned enough to pay his taxes, repay a loan from his father and pay a woman in his parish to knit him some silk stockings. Unfortunately, he doesn't indicate the dollar amount which any of this cost, but to cover his taxes and then some must have been relatively significant. Even though the bounty increased over the span of 5 years to include twenty cents for filature (unraveling the cocoon), twenty cents for throwing (twisting the threads together) and twenty cents for weaving each pound of cocoons, the state's effort to foster this cottage industry ended by 1845. At its peak production in 1843, the state raised over 1 million cocoons. Although the climate in Vermont was just not conducive to raising silkworms and in the end thwarted the state's attempt to establish sericulture (the raising of silkworms) as a commercial enterprise, vestiges of this agricultural experiment can be seen about the state in pockets of mulberry trees (the staple of a silkworm's diet) planted to feed the silkworms. Did you know... the silkworm's growth from hatching to maturity, which takes only about 30 days, is the equivalent of a newborn baby growing to the size of a T-Rex dinosaur! the moth that emerges from the silk cocoon has no mouth and only lives about 3 days each cocoon is a single strand of silk about a mile long it takes 2 mulberry trees to feed 4000 silkworms to produce 12 pounds of cocoons which will provide 1 pound of reeled silk for weaving. |