by Clara Parkes
A heavily laden logging truck passed me heading south. Then another, and another, each spraying a muddy mist on my windshield. Ahead, fantastical clouds of steam billowed from the Somerset Paper Mill, now owned by South African conglomerate Sappi and one of the area’s largest employers, producing 725,000 metric tons of paper and 525,000 metric tons of pulp each year.
I passed through the elegant old mill town of Skowhegan, birthplace of the first woman U.S. Senator, Margaret Chase Smith. It’s also home to the New Balance shoe factory and one singularly unremarkable Thai restaurant. Recently, Skowhegan has also gained notoriety in the country’s regional artisan bread movement after the old jail was bought and transformed into a grist mill. Maine Grains and the Maine Grain Alliance offer inspiring tales of rebirth and regeneration of a local economy.
It was spring, and the heavily rutted side roads were all posted with fluorescent orange “Heavy Loads Limited” signs. The frost heaves were bad that year, turning even the main road into a series of roller coasters best taken slow if you didn’t want to go airborne.
Just past the old Athens Grange Hall I saw a tiny sign for Harmony. Not a proud “Welcome!” sign, but a small green road marker that indicated a right turn. A mile or so down an even bumpier side road, I reached a cluster of old wooden-frame houses along a river. This was downtown Harmony.
I spotted the tower first. A tall, weathered gray box attached to an equally weathered gray building. In the muddy bleakness of Maine’s early spring, it had a sinister look. The place reminded me of the Stephen King story “Graveyard Shift.” It’s set in an old Maine textile mill with terrible rat problems and a maze of tunnels that run beneath it. Of course, people start dying. And because it’s Stephen King, the tunnels lead to a cemetery where a massive and completely horrifying rat creature devours unsuspecting humans at night.
Remembering this story made me briefly consider turning around and getting out while I still could, but reason prevailed. Closer, I saw new trucks parked along a cheerful blue outcropping of buildings opposite the mill. Lights were on, and as soon as I got out of my car, Lindsey bounded out the door and extended a hand. “So you found the place!”
He was jolly and energetic, as if St. Nick had shaved his beard, lost a few pounds, and moved to Maine to start a mill. Immediately he demystified the place for me. We walked toward the mill, which looked less sinister by the minute. He explained that we were looking at a “new” mill building constructed in 1921, after the original 1821 structure had burned to the ground. They’d gone all out with the new mill, giving it state-of-the-art things like a poured concrete foundation, three-phase electric power (unheard of at the time), a flame-retardant metal roof and metal-clad siding, a water tower fire-sprinkler system, and even a telephone, steam heat, and flush toilets.
But by 2007, when Lindsey bought the mill, business operations had started to lag. If he hadn’t come along, he estimates that the mill would’ve lasted only another year before having to close. It had no website, no email, not even an answering machine. All the books were maintained by hand in a big ledger, and invoices were typed on one of five typewriters.
Maine can be a very tribal place, especially in smaller towns. The arrival of an outsider was not universally celebrated. His modernizations were stressful for some. When he presented the office manager with a cordless phone, she eyed it suspiciously and asked, “What is it?” (She has since left.) Lindsey persisted, adding answering machines and email and QuickBooks and, yes, cordless phones. But the heart of the operations, the spinning of wool yarn, remains unchanged.
As we got closer to the mill, I heard the hum of equipment from inside and the rushing of water from the stream that had once powered the mill and still flows alongside it. I remembered a question I’d wanted to ask. I had heard that yarn straight from the mill needs to be washed to remove any residual spinning oil and perk up the fibers. Did the mill still offer any washing or dyeing services?
“You see that river?” he asked.
(Actually, neither of us could. It was on the other side of the building.)
“The EPA comes twice a year to make sure we aren’t dumping anything in it. Even our toilets have to run their pipes under the building, under the road, under those houses, back and beyond . . .” He kept pointing.
“Off to a cemetery with giant man-eating rats?” I joked.
He turned and smiled. “Oh, did you know they shot Graveyard Shift here? In our basement!”
While I was processing this new bit of information, he opened a small, weather-beaten door and beckoned me inside.
There’s a smell that a good, wholesome, old-fashioned wool yarn has. It’s pungent and spicy and woolly in a way that can be intoxicating. It’s not just the smell of sheep or barnyard. Yes, it’s some of that, but it’s also the scent of lanolin and the special oil that is sprayed on fibers to tame static and lubricate their journey through all the equipment. I followed Lindsey inside, and that fragrance—at full strength—hit me like a big sheep-shaped pie in the face. My brain went into sensory overload. I looked around the sunny, wood-filled space with gorgeous, old, perfectly preserved, well-oiled, still-operating mill equipment. It was like I’d been shrunk to the size of a pinhead and dropped inside my mother’s Singer Featherweight sewing machine. It was heady and overwhelming. My ability to ask smart questions, take notes, and document the visit with photos and videos was severely impaired.
Still talking and not at all sensing my distress, Lindsey pulled me along on his well-rehearsed mill tour. We started in the basement so we could see where the wool came in, was tossed into a sealed room, and was blown around to be blended and opened. The walls had blackened over time from all the lanolin and dust, forming a perfect surface for past workers to leave their mark. Rodney Giles had written his name in tidy script. A “Randy was here” had been modified to say “wasn’t.” In big, bold letters, Earl declared his love for Alice.
Lindsey led me to a “duster” that circulated air through the fibers and vacuumed the debris into a separate bag. He likes to run fibers through the duster twice to make things easier on the spinning equipment. He opened a clear plastic bag to show me the debris they’d gotten from my wool. It looked like beach sand but with the consistency of sawdust. I was surprised by how much was still in the wool after it had been scoured. He told me that even more would come out when it hit the carding machine upstairs.
An old wooden conveyor belt covered with thin metal spikes grabbed the fibers and led them into the “picker,” where fierce metal claws teased open the fibers and prepared them for carding. On their second pass through the pickers, brass-tipped nozzles sprayed a fine mist of oil over them, like that spritz of oil in the pan to keep vegetables from sticking.
“It’s a water-soluble, non-petroleum-based cotton conditioner,” he explained. “Hair conditioner, really.”
The fibers are then blown through ducts up to the mixing room on the top floor. We walked up creaky wooden stairs that had worn down in the middle from decades of use, past a yellowed piece of paper on which was carefully handwritten, “Not Responsible for Injuries to Visitors,” past a cartoon outline of a sheep drawn in white chalk, past a faded blue ribbon from the St. Louis County Fair, to the top floor where the cards and spinning mule reside.
With its exquisite shapely form, its metal tracks and steel wheels and long row of orderly spindles (now numbering 240), this mule is a work of art. A hand gear starts and stops the mule and looks exactly like the one that San Francisco cable car drivers use to operate the cars. Taken together, it was the most stunning machinery—ancient, elegant, fierce, and graceful—that I had ever seen. Ironically, this equipment that gives this mill its most historic quality is also its newest, made in 1948 by Johnson & Bassett of Worcester, Massachusetts.
On the other side of the room is the carding machine, a glorious yet still functional relic built in North Andover, Massachusetts, by the Davis & Furber Machine Co. in 1919. This machine’s sole purpose is to
take clean wool and tease open the fibers, draw them all into the same direction, and give any remaining dirt or vegetable matter a chance to fall out.
The carding machine is made up of many, many cylinders, each coated with fine wire teeth rather like industrial-grade cat brushes. Each cylinder is a different size and rotates at a different speed in such a way that the fibers are constantly pulled from one cylinder to the next to the next. The wool enters as clumpy pillow fluff and emerges as a diaphanous sheet of fibers that is then gathered like a veil, lifted overhead, and then laid mechanically on a second set of cards at a ninety-degree angle, so that everything is blended and aligned twice as evenly. Technically, it’s a two-breaker woolen system with a camel-transfer in the middle and a finisher at the end.
The finisher was the best part. At the back of the whole thing—which has the size and imposing presence of two circus calliopes parked head to head—the sheet of fiber is split into ninety-six little strips, each the width of a pinkie finger. These strips are fed through the most crucial part of the whole thing: the “rub condenser.” Wide green rollers move side to side in opposite directions as the strips are drawn between then, rubbing the fibers together so that they can hold their cohesion when draft and twist are applied on the mule. At this stage it’s called “pencil roving,” and it forms the basis for the woolen spinning system.
Up to this point, everything had been shown to me while the equipment was off. All surfaces were covered in a layer of wool fluff as thick as a stack of pancakes in places. To prevent drafts, milky plastic had been stapled over all the windows. My wool had been running through the cards when they shut them off, as had the yarn on the mule, the spindles only partially full. That sense of life frozen at a crucial moment, paired with the antique surroundings, ghostly fuzz, and equally ghostly light gave the whole setting the feeling of Miss Havisham’s mansion in Dickens’s Great Expectations. The anticipation was killing me. I finally asked Lindsey if we could start up the equipment. I’d come to watch yarn be made, after all.
Over the next two days, Lindsey showed me everything. He started up the cards so I could watch the fibers draw from one cylinder to the next, opening and aligning into a sheet of beauty. I could laugh at the comical “waa-waa-waa” sound made by the rub condenser, its aprons drunkily tottering back and forth while spitting out strips of wool.
Best of all, I got to watch the mule. If there is one thing I wish for you in this world, it is a chance to witness a spinning mule in action. It is a beautiful ballet of fiber and machinery that mimics the movements a handspinner makes when using a walking wheel. The spool of ninety-six pencil roving ends is moved off the cards and over to the mule, where it’s placed on a fixed head called the “creel.” Each of those ninety-six ends is fed through rollers and attached to a corresponding bobbin on a carriage. Set in motion, this elegant chorus line of bobbins pulls away from the creel, traveling some five feet on a metal track, all while each bobbin is rotating and applying twist to the roving.
During this “draw stroke,” all is in a tremulous state of suspended animation. Tiny tufts of fiber pop into the air like woolly fireflies, while the yarn itself vibrates like the strings of a harp.
The spell is broken when the bobbins stop spinning. A long metal “faller” wire pushes the freshly spun yarn down to bobbin height, and the carriage jerks back another foot or so to take up any slack. Then it begins its return trip to the creel, a process called “putting up,” winding freshly spun yarn onto each bobbin as it travels.
The dance repeats itself four times a minute—the carriage traveling on its track, the fibers making another dance midair, then another clamp of the wire, another jerk back to take up tension, and another putting up. From every angle—and I tried them all—it was absolutely glorious. Lindsey began leaving me places, at subsequent stations, while he went about his business.
The minute one of the pencil roving strands runs out, the whole process is shut off. All remaining unspun pencil roving ends are ripped off the other spools and tossed in a bin for re-carding. Meanwhile, the completely full bobbins of freshly spun yarn are put in another bin and dropped through a chute to the next wonderland, the second floor.
That’s where I met Cheryl, a cheerful brunette in bright white New Balance sneakers, who wasn’t sure if she was the second or third generation of her family to work in the mill. She showed me how they took yarn from the mule bobbins and rewound it onto the bobbin required for the next step: plying, or as they call it, twisting. They had rows of pegs set up to hold mule bobbins, many of them endearingly reinforced at the base with layers of duct tape.
Their twister dates from 1928, and its sole job is to twist together two (or more) strands of spun wool into a plied yarn. The trick is to calibrate the twist so that it renders a balanced yarn, which you won’t be able to know right off the bobbin because the twist requires time to set. They had it down to a science.
After the first round of twisting was done, I followed her to the skeiner, where she hoisted forty bobbins of plied yarn atop the frame. With practiced speed, she tied a tail end of yarn from each bobbin onto one of the long wooden slats that formed a cylinder running the length of the machine. Picture the slats of a park bench forming an open cylinder that runs for twenty feet and can collapse into itself like an umbrella—necessary for getting the skeins off the frame. Once everything was ready, she pulled a lever that set the cylinder in motion. It spun and spun and spun, taking the yarn from the cones and winding it into large bands, or skeins (sometimes also called “hanks”). This particular piece of equipment was so old, they’d had to put wood blocks under all the legs to raise it a touch—people are taller now than they were one hundred years ago.
Cheryl ran the machine until the cylinder had made the precise number of rotations that would deliver a skein weighing four ounces (113 g). While most mills now work in the metric system and deliver skeins in grams (usually fifty or one hundred), Bartlett remains loyally calibrated to the Imperial system. Cylinder stopped, Cheryl then made her way with lightning speed down the line, snipping each end and tying it loosely around the skein in what looked like a single motion. When she’d finished, she started all over again, this time retrieving the original end of each skein, all forty of them, and tying them around the skein and knotting the end. She did this all while chatting and without missing a beat.
“As a knitter,” she said, “I really envy this run. It’s so springy!”
She closed the cylinder’s umbrella frame just enough to be able to pull the skeins to the end, where she loosely twisted them into groups of five and carried them in giant puffy armfuls to a waiting scale nearby. Each bundle had to weigh exactly ten pounds, which meant they were spinning, plying, and skeining a perfectly consistent yarn. If it was off, something had gotten miscalibrated and would need to be checked.
I held my breath while she looked at the scale. She smiled and nodded. “Yup! Ten pounds on the nose!” She wrote it in an old three-ring notebook, then marked and numbered each bundle with a manila tag.
Not all of Bartlett’s yarns end up skeined. Some go onto big cones for weavers and machine-knitters—including the Massachusetts company that makes classic crew-neck sweaters for Bartlett. They’d approached a nationally known outdoor retailer about carrying the sweaters, but the rep told them that their customers wouldn’t pay $75 for a New England wool sweater. (To which I say true: They’d pay $175.) Bartlett does a swift business selling direct and wholesale, and these sweaters are very popular in Japan.
At the end of my second day, I asked Lindsey when he thought everything might be done. It was already April, and people were eager to get their hands on some yarn.
“I should have the rest ready for you by . . .” He paused. “Thursday?” he said.
Cheryl shot him a wary look and reminded him that someone was going to be out that day. At that time, they were producing about five hundred pounds a week with “two bodies,” as Lindsey had put it.
“F
riday.” He paused. “Well, I want to be safe here, so let me say Monday.” I waited.
“No, Tuesday,” he said, nodding. We settled on the following Thursday, and he walked me out to my car.
I asked Lindsey if it bugged him that some people considered his mill more of an out-of-the-way museum than a working business. He laughed and shook his head, and then he recited the names of other equally busy textile manufacturers in the area. Harmony is not in the middle of nowhere, he insisted. In fact, quite the opposite. I got the sense that he had big plans for the place. My hunch was correct: In just five years he would be opening a small wool-scouring operation and representing Maine in a Made in America product showcase at the White House.
All this time I’d been eyeing the wool like a hungry child on a tour of a bakery, looking but not touching. When Lindsey suggested I take a few bundles home to tide me over until the rest was done, it finally hit me that all this work I’d watched, all that yarn being made, was mine.
I tenderly placed six bundles of fresh yarn into the car, resisting the urge to buckle them in with a seat belt, and we said goodbye. Even before Skowhegan, I started to get a whiff of the yarn. By Augusta, the whole car was full of that intoxicating perfume—the residual lanolin and sheep and spinning oil combined. It got stronger and stronger until even I, one of the greatest fans of the smell, had to crack open the windows. As if he’d secretly placed a tracking device in the yarn, Lindsey called just then: “I’m just checking to make sure you haven’t passed out from the wool fumes?”
That night I held a skein in my hands and waited for the usual reaction—the ho-hum ennui, the conclusion already written in my head without using the stuff. There was nothing but an eagerness to snip that knot and get my hands into the wool. I cast on a random number of stitches and began to knit. And knit. And knit. My hands were unable to stop.
