CLOTHES

 

Clothes were home spun. Spinning wheels, like the one kept in the lumber room at the Fisher farm, were used to spin hemp, flax or wool*. Some of this farm's windows had been boarded up to avoid paying the tax on light. This must have hindered Grandma Fisher as she sat at her spinning wheel, especially on short dark days and long winter evenings, when rooms were lit only by tallow candles or rush lights.

 

* Hemp and flax were grown locally; there was a hemp garth in Barrow Village.

 

Drawing by James Askew