Sarah Myers Latimer Archives - Petaluma Historian

Free Love in 1850s Petaluma

ONE WOMAN’S QUEST FOR LOVE ON HER OWN TERMS

*Abigail Goodwin Haskell (Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)*

In 1857, Abigail and Barnabus Haskell arrived in Petaluma pursuing a California dream of free love. It wasn’t quite the promiscuous Summer of Love that would inflame the Golden State a century later, but it did share with the era one irresistible attraction: a rebellion against authority. For the Haskells, the rebellion was over marriage.^[1]

Under the yoke of traditional values and institutions back east, marriage was predominately a transactional affair. Traditionally arranged between families, there was little room for love or individual consent. Once married, a bride and her fortune became the property of her husband. Divorce was largely unheard of.^[2]

Free lovers denounced it as “legitimized adultery.” They believed everyone should have the ability to choose a monogamous partner based solely on love, and to end the relationship once the love did.^[3]

“Woman was not created to be the slave of man,” Abigail Haskell wrote. “She was to be his equal, to walk upright by his side in her native dignity and purity.”^[4]

*Barnabus and Abigail Haskell with son William, 1850 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)*

Petaluma was still in early formation when the Haskells arrived. Founded during a potato boom in 1852 that quickly went bust, the local economy was rebounding thanks to California’s new wheat boom.^[5] Abigail taught at private schools before being appointed principal of the town’s first public school. Barnabus, a hatter by trade, purchased a dry goods store on Main Street.^[6]

*The Brick School at 5th & B streets, build 1869 (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum)*

Of Petaluma’s 1,300 residents at the time, 38% were women.^[7]While women were largely relegated to the home back east—leaving men to engage in the public world of business and politics—California’s boom-and-bust cycles made such separate spheres challenging. Women burdened with dissolute or absent husbands found themselves having to work to support themselves and their children.

Recognizing their financial insecurity, state legislators passed legislation allowing women to independently own property, operate businesses, enter into contracts and lawsuits, and more easily file for divorce.^[8]

Those new rights coincided with advances in safer sex. Thanks to Charles Goodyear’s recent invention of vulcanized rubber, sales of condoms, douching syringes, and “womb veil” diaphragms were soaring. An array of “female medicines” for birth control, varying in effectiveness and safety, were also available from pharmacies, dry-goods stores, and mail-order catalogs.^[9]

*Female medicines in the mid-1800s (public domain)*

As fertility rates began to plummet in the 1850s, divorce cases began to rise, with 70% of the plaintiffs being women.^[10] Meanwhile, the women’s suffragist movement was gaining traction, having recently kicked off at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York.

The movement evolved from an earlier 19^th century evangelical crusade known as the Second Great Awakening.^[11] Aimed at purifying society in preparation for Christ’s return, it was predominately composed of white, middle-class women. To exert their influence outside the home, they organized into socially acceptable prayer groups, and began calling for a range of social reforms, including temperance, abolition, children’s rights, and female emancipation.^[12]

The Haskells converted to the crusade soon after their marriage in 1837, setting off from New York City with a small band of missionaries to establish a Baptist church in Galveston, Texas.^[13] Returning to New York City a few years later, the couple joined the Swedenborgian Church, a Christian denomination inspired by the 18^th century Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

Swedenborgians believed in marriage equality. They also believed in a divine love that pervaded and moved the material world, leaving one to follow either the path of self-love, which led ultimately to the realms of hell, or the path of love for others, which led to the heavens.^[14] The path to the heavens attracted reformists like the Haskells.

But it was Swedenborg’s revelatory claims—particularly, the immortality of the soul after death—that had the greatest impact on American culture. His belief in the existence of an immaterial reality beyond reach of the human senses was buttressed with visions, trances, and dreams. He claimed to have conversed with spirits and angels on a daily basis.^[15]

Those claims gave rise in the 1850s to a countercultural movement known as Spiritualism.^[16]

It began when Maggie and Kate Fox, two teenage sisters in upstate New York, claimed to have heard “rappings” from the dead. Joined by their older sister Leah, they began staging public performances as trance mediums communicating with souls of the deceased, setting off a new national sensation.^[17]

*The Fox sisters, Leah, Kate, and Maggie (courtesy of Association of Religious Data Archives)*

Despite its questionable legitimacy, Spiritualism filled a void left by traditional religion, which placed death at the periphery. At a time when one child in every three died before age ten, and many women did not survive childbirth, Spiritualism provided a sense of solace and closure to many struggling with grief.^[18]That included the Haskells, whose oldest child died when she was eight years old.^[19]

*(illustration from Frank Leslies Illustrated Weekly, April 2, 1887*)

In Petaluma, the Haskells devoted themselves to the Swedenborgian doctrine of service to others, leading local groups calling for children’s rights, abolition, and temperance (shorthand for husbands who beat their wives and children, and spent their wages on drink).^[20]Every summer, Barnabus returned to the east coast to attend the national Swedenborg convention.^[21]

The couple also sought fellowship with a local group of Spiritualists who met at the Liberty Street home of Chester Hatch, operator of the town’s first foundry, and his wife Lucretia, a hospice nurse. Chester represented Sonoma County in the Spiritualists’ state conventions. The couple’s home gatherings often featured seances with visiting mediums.^[22]

*Petaluma spiritualist Lucretia Hatch (San Francisco Call, March 6, 1901)*

During the bloodshed of the Civil War, Spiritualism’s popularity grew by an estimated two million followers.^[23]The only religious sect to recognize the equality of women, it produced the first large group of female spiritual leaders—typically young, white, single, and Protestant—to address large public gatherings, free from the patriarchal environment of churches. Following the war, female mediums began migrating to California, where they became founding members of the state’s women’s suffragist movement.^[24]

In December of 1869, Abigail called a meeting at her home to launch the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association. A few weeks later, she traveled to San Francisco with Lucretia Hatch and another local Swedenborgian, Sarah Myers Latimer, to attend the inaugural convention of the California Woman Suffrage Association. A big part of Abigail’s quest was securing equal access to higher education for women.^[25]

*National Woman’s Suffrage Convention, 1870 (public domain)*

At the convention, Abigail was elected the association’s first president, and Latimer one of her vice presidents.^[26] The group’s first order of business was organizing a petition drive for a state referendum granting women the vote. A forceful and persuasive writer, Abigail, took to the newspapers to make her case.

*Sarah Myers Latimer, founding vice-president, California Woman Suffrage Association (Petlauma Historical Library & Museum*)

“Woman is declared inferior to man,” she wrote. “She has no voice in politics, government or law, and we see the sad, lamentable consequences. Brute force is acknowledged as the only power in the universe. Love, that love which the Lord enjoined upon his disciples, is trampled underfoot under the ruthless, iron heel of man-made civilization.”^[27]

In March 1870, Abigail led a female delegation to Sacramento to address a select committee of the state legislature—the first women in California history to do so. She presented the committee with the suffrage petition signed by more than three thousand supporters, calling for a referendum to amend the state constitution granting women the vote.^[28]

“We claim to be recognized as citizens of this free Republic!” she told legislators.^[29] She also asked legislators to open up the new state university in Berkeley to women (the campus began enrolling women six months later).^[30]

The referendum proposal was overwhelmingly defeated in the state assembly. California women would not be granted the vote until 1911.^[31]

There were further setbacks. In 1873, Congress sought to curb the free love movement by passing the Comstock Law, which banned sending contraceptives through the mail, along with sex education, including information about sexually transmitted diseases. By 1880, most states had outlawed abortion.^[32]

*Free love advocate Victoria Woodhull depicted as “Mrs. Satan in parody of conservative pushback (Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872, Library of Congress)*

“Woman suffrage in America is on the decline,” reported the Petaluma Courier in 1877, “and justly so. It has been agitated by a bad lot of harum-scarum women, who have mixed free-love, spiritualism, and all sorts of woman’s rights into a sort of political and social hotchpotch that has disgusted right-thinking people.”^[33]

Abigail viewed such attacks as teaching moments, although she expressed disappointment that her opponents only had “trash and scurrility” to offer in their opposition. In 1879, she launched the Sonoma-Marin Women’s Christian Temperance Union as its founding president. It was to be her last reform effort. After a lingering illness, she died in 1884 at the age of 64. ^[34]

Placed in a white casket, Abigail was drawn by a team of white horses to the Cypress Hill Cemetery in a white hearse of white plumes and drapings. The pallbearers were all former students of hers.^[35]

“Following the doctrines of the illustrious Swedenborg,” wrote Philip Cowen, a close friend and local bookstore owner, “death had no terror for a mind like hers, who, no doubt, never wronged any living being, hence she had no fear of an angry God, for with her, “God was love.”^[36]

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier July 19, 2024.

******

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Ann Nisson, “Abby and Barney,” an unpublished biography of Abigail Haskell, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum.

[2] Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 1-3; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Second Edition (Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 195.

[3] Faulkner, p. 1; Braude, p. 119.

[4] Nisson.

[5] Gaye LeBaron, “How Sonoma County Prized Potato Got its Start,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, September 17, 2013; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs.69, 156; Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 24-25; James Gerber, “The Gold Rush Origins of California’s Wheat Economy,” http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-22532010000200002;.

[6] Ad announcing the Excelsior dry goods store now owned by Barnabus Haskell, Sonoma County Journal, December 25, 1857; Per Ann Nisson, from May 1856 or 1857 to April 1859, Abigail was employed at Miss Atkins Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia, teaching English, before beginning to teach in Petaluma; List of teachers, Sonoma County Journal, July 22, 1859; “The Closing of Our Public School,” Sonoma County Journal, December 28, 1860.

[7] Thompson, p. 56.

[8] Bonnie L. Ford, “Women, Marriage, and Divorce in California, 1849–1872,” California Legal History, Vol. 16, 2021, pgs. 6-7, 10, 34.

[9] Halle Lieberman, “A Short History of the Condom,” JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/; “19th Century Artifacts: History of Birth Control,” Dittrick Medical History Center, Case Western Reserve University, https://artsci.case.edu/dittrick/online-exhibits/history-of-birth-control/contraception-in-america-1800-1900/19th-century-artifacts/

[10] Ford, p.11; Janet Farrell Brody, Contraception and Fertility Rates in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pgs. ix-x, 2-3.

[11] Faye E. Duden, “Women’s Rights, Abolitionism, and Reform in Antebellum and Gilded Age America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, oxforedre.com. https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-20

[12] George M. Fredrickson, “The Coming of the Lord: The Northern Protestant Clergy and the Civil War Crisis,” in Miller, Randall M.; Stout, Harry S.; Wilson, Charles Reagan, eds. (1998). Religion and the American Civil War. Oxford University Press. pp. 110–30; Nancy Cott, “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 3 (1), 1975, pp. 15-16;Mary Ryan, “A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800 to 1840,”American Quarterly, Vol. 30 (5), 1978, p. 619.

[13] Nisson; Benjamin Franklin Fuller, History of Texas Baptists (Louisville, KY: Baptist Book Company, 1900), p. 109.

[14] Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Marriage Love, 1768 (Rotch Edition. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907), in The Divine Revelation of the New Jerusalem (2012), n. 308; Olle Hjern, “The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in Scandinavia,” in Scribe of Heaven, edited by Jonathan S. Rose, Stuart Shotwell, and Mary Lou Bertucci (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2005), 157; “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[15] Richard Lines, “Swedenborg and Spiritualism,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 69, 2005, 113–119; Richard Lines, Things Heard and Seen, the Newsletter of the Swedenborg Society, London, No. 1, (Spring 2000); “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[16] “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[17] Karen Abbott, “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism,” Smithsonian magazine, October 30, 2012; Braude, p. 2; Daniel Bowlin, “The American Phantasmagoria: The Rise of Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century America,” Masters Thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 2019.

https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2369&context=theses

[18] Bowlin; “Swedenborg’s Cultural Influence,” Swedenborg Foundation, Swedenborg.com. https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/influence/

[19] Nisson.

[20] Barnabus led the local Sons of Temperance, and Abigail their ladies auxiliary (Ad, Petaluma Argus, January 14, 1862; “Card of Thanks,” Sonoma County Journal, July 8, 1859); Abigail also served as Worthy Chief Templar of the local Independent Organization of the Good Templars (IOGT), and as a board member of the local California Youth Association 1861 (Ad for IOGT, “Youth’s Association,” Petaluma Argus, November 12, 1861).

[21] Barnabus’ attendance at the annual conventions is documented from 1851 to 1871 in the Journal of the 35^th-36^th General Conventions of the New Church in the U.S, Journal of the 37^th-46^th General Conventions of the New Church in the U.S.

[22] “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, November 14, 1883; “State Convention of Spiritualists,” Petaluma Argus, June 7, 1866; “Death of Col. C.P. Hatch, Petaluma Courier, March 19, 1893; “Mrs. Lucretia Hatch,” Petaluma Courier, March 14, 1901; “Noted Spiritualist Dies,” San Francisco Call, March 5, 1901.

[23] Abbott.

[24] Braude, pgs. 2, 195.

[25] Nisson.

[26] “Woman Suffrage,” Petaluma Argus, January 8, 1870; “Woman, State Convention of Female Suffragists,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 1870; “Woman Suffrage, Third Day of the State Convention,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 29, 1870;

[27] Nisson.

[28] The Suffrage Question,” Sacramento Bee, March 19, 1870; Theodore Henry Hittell, History of California, Volume 4 (San Francisco: N.J. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 435.

[29] Hittell, p. 435; “The Suffrage Question,” Sacramento Bee, March 19, 1870.

[30] Nisson; “They Have Done It,” Sacramento Bee, October 4, 1870.

[31] “Sacramento Correspondence,” San Francisco Examiner, March 23, 1870; “Woman Suffrage Carries by About 4,000,” San Francisco Call, October 12, 1911.

[32] “What to Know About the Comstock Act,” New York Times, May 16, 2023; “The History of Abortion Access in the U.S.,” Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania. https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-profs-weigh-history-abortion-access-us

[33] Petaluma Courier, September 13, 1877.

[34] Nisson; “Women’s Christian Union,” Petaluma Courier, November 12, 1879; “Courierlets,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1884.

[35] “Polly Larkin’s Pot-pourri,” Petaluma Courier, January 16, 1884.

[36] “In Memoriam,” Petaluma Argus, January 26, 1884.

The Ladies Silk Culture Society

How Chinese Imports Doomed a Women’s Home Industry

Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, built 1892, supported cheap silk imports over a domestic industry (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

On the evening of July 16, 1892, Ida Belle McNear called the women in her social coterie together for a meeting at Petaluma’s city hall. The topic was silk. Numerous attempts to create a raw silk industry in California over the previous 25 years had come to naught. Now, McNear believed she’d discovered a breakthrough.

Her father-in-law, grain merchant and capitalist John McNear, had recently convinced a San Francisco silk manufacturer to build a new mill in Petaluma. After some arm twisting, the mill’s executives, Edward Carlson and J.P. Currier, agreed to purchase California-grown raw silk from Ida Belle McNear at a 25% premium over the price they paid for imported raw silk from China. The men also warned her that her scheme would never work.

Ida Belle McNear, center pointing, with family members on the Petaluma wharf (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Dauntless, the headstrong 32-year old McNear forged ahead, launching that evening at city hall the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association.

America’s dalliance with sericulture, or silk farming, began in 1825, after Congress approved the import of silk goods from Europe and China, setting off a new fashion fad. A year later, the white mulberry tree, moris multicaulis, was introduced to America from southeast Asia. When eaten by silkworms, the tree’s tender leaves produced silk of the highest quality.

A subsequent “Mulberry Craze” soon overtook the country, giving rise to horticulture’s largest speculation bubble since the infamous “tulipmania” in 17th century Holland. Stock companies were formed to finance the plantings and import millions of silkworm eggs from Europe. Silk mills were rapidly constructed in New England and Michigan.

At the height of the market, the price of a young tree start rose from 5¢ to $5, before the bubble burst in 1839. Five years later, a mysterious blight destroyed what was left of America’s mulberry groves, forcing domestic factories to begin importing raw silk from Europe and Asia.

Poster for auction of mulberry trees in Connecticut, 1840 (photo crickethillgarden.com)

Twenty years later, a second American sericulture craze began after disease devastated mulberry groves in France and Italy. This time, the craze’s epicenter was California, whose Mediterranean climate made it ideal for growing mulberry trees.

Led by a French botanist named Louis Prevost, the craze was incentivized for the first two year by bounties from the state legislature of $250 for cultivating at least 5,000 mulberry trees and $300 for each 100,000 silk cocoons produced.

Orchards and vineyards were advised to border their roads and property lines with mulberry trees in preparation for the coming sericulture boom. California’s largest vineyard at that time, Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma, planted 3,000 mulberry trees around its 500 acres of grapes.

Diagram of the various stages of a silkworm (photo Barre Montpelier Times Argus)

Before the new craze could gain significant traction, Prevost died, leaving California sericulture to flounder as Europe recovered from its blight.

In 1880, imported raw silk sales surged to $13 million from a mere $3 million ten years earlier, as American women again became entranced with silk fashion. The sudden rise inspired a circle of influential Philadelphia women interested in promoting a domestic sericulture industry to form the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States.

Twelve auxiliary groups sprang up around the country, including in California, where a group of prominent suffragists with political clout formed the California Silk Culture Association.

Led by Elise Wiehe Hittell, wife of state senator and eminent California historian Theodore H. Hittell, the association’s members included Laura de Force Gordon, co-founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association, journalist, and the second female lawyer admitted to the state bar; Ellen Clark Sargent, treasurer of the National Woman Suffrage Association and wife of U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent; and Windsor’s Sarah Myers Latimer, a co-founder of the Sonoma Country Woman Suffrage Association and wife of California Superior Court Judge Lorenzo Latimer.

Portrait of Sarah Myers Latimer of Windsor by her son L.P. Latimer (photo *Windsor Museum and Historical Society*)

The women promoted sericulture as a home industry, pointing to Italy and France, where raising silk worms and reeling silk from cocoons was managed as a side business by women on family farms. In the five or six weeks it took each year to feed the worms and unreel the raw silk from the cocoons from 100 mulberry trees, a mother and her daughters were able make $300, or $8,500 in today’s currency, providing them with some economic independence.

Women reeling silk from cocoons, 1895 (photo History Museum, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)

The silk culturists compared the work to that of raising chickens and eggs, which in the early 1880s appeared to defy industrialization, as chickens were still pastoral creatures who ranged about the barnyard and farm, leaving their eggs in mangers or under porches until the farm wife sent the children out to scare up any available eggs to sell for “pin-money” in town.

But industrialization was coming even for the chickens, thanks to innovations in the early 1880s of a Danish immigrant named Christopher Nisson at his Pioneer Hatchery in Two Rock.

Using an efficient new incubator developed in Petaluma by Isaac Dias and Lyman Byce, Nisson designed a poultry assembly line that began with hatching eggs in dozens of incubators, then placing the baby chicks in stove-heated brooder houses that served as surrogate mother hens. Once they were old enough to begin laying eggs themselves, they were moved them to a colony house, where their eggs could be easily collected.

Christopher Nisson’s Pioneer Hatchery, Two Rock, 1920 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Nisson’s industrialized model would eventually give rise to a major egg boom in Petaluma that would last until the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the women of the California Silk Association pressed forward with their craft-scale model for sericulture, using their political clout to persuaded the California legislature to create a State Board of Silk Culture, with five of its nine appointees drawn from the silk association. The state board distributed subsidies for planting mulberry trees and raising silk cocoons around the state, including in Sonoma County, where the sericulture effort was led by Frances Purrington on the farm she shared with her husband Joseph in Green Valley.

Laura De Force Gordon also convinced the legislature to appropriate $7,500 for funding for two years a free filature, or silk-reeling school, in San Francisco for young girls.

Laura de Force Gordon, 1887 (image Library of Congress)

On the promotional front, the women made a push at agricultural expositions, including the 1882 Philadelphia Silk Exposition, where cocoons raised by Mrs. H.C. Downing of San Rafael won first prize for exceptional quality; the 1884 Sonoma-Marin District Agricultural Fair, where a sericulture exhibit by horticulturalist Dr. Galen Burdell of Novato became the talk of the exposition; and the 1884 California state fair, where Lyman Byce’s new Petaluma Incubator Company displayed a baby incubator to improve the efficiency of hatching silkworm eggs.

The association also worked with the State Board of Silk Culture to promote silk culture in the public schools, distributing mulberry trees, silkworm eggs, and instructions to provide young girls with an elementary knowledge.

For most young women, the only employment available at the time was teaching, which only employed one in ten of them, or factory work. Many reported to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported. Silk culture was intended to teach them to earn money at home, and so provide them with an option to having to marry unwisely in order to be supported.

In 1885, the association helped to secure in the East Bay town of Piedmont one of five silk Experimental Stations established by the U.S. Department of Agricultural across the country to foster sericulture.

Piedmont Experimental Silk Culture Station, 1890s (photo History Room, Oakland Public Library)

Shortly after, Hittell spun off a new organization from the California Silk Association called the Ladies Silk Culture Society to foster sericulture for women in the state. The society’s membership such luminaries as Charles Crocker, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, U.S. Senator Leland Stanford, former state governor George C. Perkins, and a number of professors of agriculture and the sciences at the University of California.

The society assumed operation of the Experimental Silk Station in Piedmont, which consisted of a building for silk reeling and a eucalyptus-covered tract of 15 acres. With $10,000 appropriated from the state legislature, they replaced the eucalyptus with 6,000 mulberry trees and acquired half a million silkworm eggs for annual distribution. Hiring 100 women and girls, they used the station to teach people how to cultivate and handle silkworms, with the expectation they would be sent out as teachers of others in far reaches of the state.

Their efforts however faced an uphill battle with the industrialization overtaking the country. The Carlson-Currier Silk Mill in San Francisco publicly claimed to “have proven itself the fast friend of native-grown silk” by spinning some raw silk from the society’s Piedmont Experimental Station.

Trade card for Carlson & Currier, a subsidiary of Belding Bros. & Co. Silk Manufacturers, 1883 (California Historical Society)

However, as the west coast subsidiary of one of the country’s largest silk manufacturers, Michigan-based Belding Brothers & Company, their business relied upon cheap raw silk imports from Asia, where laborers made between 6 and 15 cents a day, versus $1 a day in California, for the tedious task of reeling raw silk from cocoons by hand. Half a pound represented a good day’s work.

Industrialists argued the solution was in labor-saving filature machinery that would take the silk directly from the cocoon and twist it for the weaver. American inventors set out to develop a reliable automatic reeling machine, but by the late 1880s, all attempts had proved disappointing.

In 1890, as import sales of raw silk rose to $24 million, or roughly $700 million in today’s currency, silk culturists called for tariffs on imported raw silk so as to make domestic sericulture competitive.

Silk dinner or reception dress in the 1880s (photo Frick Pittsburg)

Other industries were also lobbying congress for what came to be called the McKinley Act of 1890, a bill spearheaded by congressman and future president William McKinley, that raised duties of nearly 50% across a range of imported foreign goods to protect American manufacturing. Silk manufacturers, fearing silk tariffs would drive up consumer prices and thus reduce demand for silk goods, fought against the proposal, leading to its exclusion form the bill.

After the tariff battle, the political tide turned against silk culturalists, as government funding dried up at both the state and federal levels on the grounds that past appropriations had yielded poor results. In March of 1892, the Ladies Silk Culture Society purchased the Piedmont Experimental Silk Station from the U.S. government for a only $50, with plans to maintain it privately.

Four months later, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association waded into the silk culture morass. Their plan was to set up a filature in Petaluma for reeling silk from cocoons they purchased from women around the state. They would then sell the raw silk to the new Carlson-Currier Silk Mill being constructed in town at an agreed upon 25% premium, making Petaluma the new silk center of California.

Carlson-Currier Silk Mill, Petaluma, 1910 (photo Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

Carlson-Currier had been lured to Petaluma from San Francisco with incentives provided by John McNear and other capitalists in the local Improvement Club, looking to transition the town into industrial center, the “Oakland of the North Bay.” The incentives included free land for the mill site and a bonus of $12,000, or $300,000 in today’s currency.

The club’s other big selling point was access to cheap labor, specifically girls and young women from town and the surrounding farms. They already filled the factory floors of Nolan-Earl Shoe Factory and Adams Box Factory in McNear’s new Factory District near the railroad depot, as well as the new poultry hatcheries springing up around town.

Of the 200 employees Carlson-Currier ultimately employed after the mill opened in October, 1892, three quarters were female.

Merely three months after the new mill opened, Ida Belle McNear and the Petaluma Women’s Silk Association threw in the towel, realizing Carlson-Currier’s 25% premium for domestic raw silk was woefully insufficient in turning a profit on domestic sericulture. Labor costs alone for the two days it took a person to reel a pound of raw silk from cocoons by hand far outweighed the $1.40 per pound that Carlson-Currier paid for imported raw silk from Asia.

For largely the same reason, two years later the Ladies Silk Culture Society closed down their Piedmont Experimental Station, formally ending the dream of a home silk industry for women.

Inside Petaluma’s Carlson-Currier silk mill, subsidiary of Belding Bros. (photo Sonoma Country History & Genealogy Library)

Meanwhile, Petaluma’s silk mill continued to grow and thrive, doubling in size during the fashion-conscious Roaring Twenties. However, the onset of the Great Depression decimated the luxury fabric market, as did the increasing popularity of cheaper synthetics like rayon and nylon, and the embargo Japan placed on silk exports in the years preceding World War II.

After the silk mill was forced to close down in 1939, the mill was purchased by the Sunset Line & Twine Company, which operated there until 2006, after which the building was converted to a boutique hotel.

Sunset Line & Twine, 1940s (Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library)

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Sonoma Historian Journal, 2021 No. 1.

SOURCES:

Newspapers and Magazines

Los Angeles Times: David Karo, “The Fruit of Broken Dreams,” July 19, 2000.

Mercury News: Nilda Rego, “Days Gone By: Piedmont Clings to Its Caterpillars as Silkworm Mania Dies Out in California,” March 23, 2012.

Alameda Daily Argus: “Something About Silk,” November 24, 1883.

Petaluma Argus: “Our Fair,” September 1, 1882; “A Plea for Silk Culture,” March 28, 1885; “Eighteenth Annual Fair,” August 30, 1884; “Petaluma,” February 7, 1885; “The Multicaulis Mania,” June 27, 1885 (reprint from Harper’s Magazine, July 1885).

Petaluma Courier: “Silk Worms,” February 14, 1883; “The Petaluma Incubator,” October 8, 1884; “That Silkworm Foolishness,” July 30, 1890; “For a Silk Mill,” August 19, 1891; “Silk Factory Philosophy,” December 19, 1891; “The Silk Factory,” December 18, 1891; “Carlson-Currier Company,” October 19, 1892; “Silk Reeling,” January 24, 1893; “Personal Notes,” March 26, 1893.

San Francisco Call: “Enthusiastic Ladies,” July 17, 1892; Sericulture at Home,” October 2, 1892.

San Francisco Chronicle: “New Silk Mills,” S.F. Chronicle, November 29, 1891.

San Francisco Examiner: “Work for Women,” October 8, 1883; “A Young Industry,” June 23, 1884; “A Silk Culture Society,” June 5, 1885; “The Sericulturists,” October 14, 1887; “Signed by the Governor,” March 22, 1889; “The Culture of Silk,” January 25, 1891; “An Eloquent Arraignment,” March 24, 1891; “Silk Culture,” March 25, 1891; “In a Commercial Arcadia,” March 6, 1892; “Petaluma’s Silk Plant,” June 26, 1892; “To Stimulate Silk Culture,” July 21, 1892; “The Congress for Women,” May 2, 1894; “Horticulture and Agriculture,” January 24, 1894; “On the Wrong Track,” May 10, 1895;

Books, Journals, Websites

William C. Wyckoff, “Report on the Silk Manufacturing Industry of the United States,” 1880 Census. ftp.census.gov › vol-02-manufactures › 1880_v2-18

Annual Report of the Women’s Silk Culture Association of the United States, Volume 3 (Philadelphia, April, 1883).

Stanton, Anthony, Gage, History of Woman’s Suffrage, Vol. 3, p. 762.

Nelson Klose, “Sericulture in the United States,” Agricultural History, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 225-234.

E.O. Essig, “Silk Culture in California,” Agricultural Experiment Station, Circular 363, October 1945, College of Agriculture University of California at Berkeley.

Evelyn Craig Pattiani, “Silk in Piedmont,” California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4 (December, 1952), pp. 335-342.