Even if you’re a fairly serious student of American history, the name Sir George Yeardley might have escaped your notice. Not that he wasn’t important in his own right, because he was. He just wasn’t up there with those really big names we’re all so familiar with.
Yeardley was a major planter and a key figure in the development of England’s Virginia Colony in the New World. In 1618, following the death of Virginia Colony Gov. Lord De La Warr, the king appointed Yeardley as his replacement in the post. Yeardley traveled to England where he was knighted by the king in the assumption the title would help boost his authority and standing in the fledgling colony.
The following year, Yeardley returned to Virginia. He brought with him a lengthy list of instructions from the Virginia Company in London, among which was to promote the growing and harvesting of flax in the colony. The Virginia Company stockholders had high hopes that — as with tobacco, silkworm cultivation, viticulture and glassmaking — the colony’s diversification into flax would help to line their coffers.
Despite the colonists’ best efforts, however, flax never proved a commercial success. First of all, the labor involved in producing flax on a large scale was simply too intensive, i.e., every phase of it is just unbelievably hard work. Second, producing flax required a skill set that was absent among the colonists. Third, the climate of the Chesapeake region simply did not cooperate, and finally, they just seemed to have plain bad luck with the crop.
Long story short, the flax plant never rivaled tobacco as a major cash crop for the Virginia colony, although most farmers and plantation owners were able to grow enough flax to meet their own needs until well into the 1800s. In addition, flax faced stiff competition in the marketplace from cotton, which grew much better there.
As for Yeardley, history grants him the dubious distinction of being the first slave owner in colonial America. After several years in the role of governor, he returned to England for good.
In the early 1700s, German immigrants to the southeastern Pennsylvania region brought with them renewed interest in growing and harvesting flax, as well as numerous technological improvements. (But it was still really, really labor intensive.)
Unlike the lighter, sandier soils of the Chesapeake region, southeast Pennsylvania offered deep, rich soils that made flax thrive as a crop. But the Pennsylvania settlers quickly realized that, like the tobacco they were also growing, flax very quickly depleted the nutrients in the soil. This required them to replace flax with a less nutritionally draining crop every two to three years.
As German settlement spread west, over the Appalachian and Alleghany mountains into the Ohio country beyond, the cultivation of flax came with it. In every homestead in every developing village, the cultivation of flax became an absolute necessity for the making of linen for clothing. It simply became the most important crop after food.
Labor intensive. So, let’s start talking about all the labor that’s involved in growing and processing flax. And to do some of that talking, let’s turn to the pioneer memoirs of Major General David Stanley of Wayne County, Ohio, published in 1913.
Stanley wrote extensively about the early years of Ohio settlement and offered a plethora of colorful recollections about the many and varied tasks inherent in rural farming life. He noted that a family’s apparel transition from warm winter woolies to the cooler linen summer clothing which was made from flax, required an intensive amount of labor. That work began the previous spring with the planting of flax, leading to the harvesting of the crop in late August.
“The spring outfit in flax required just as much work and worry,” Stanley wrote. “Flax was sowed like timothy grass and wheat, but instead of being cut it is pulled up by the roots, a tedious process,” wrote Stanley, adding, “It is bound into small sheaves, and then carried into the barn to be threshed, again rebound in sheaves, and then carried to a mown meadow where it is laid in thin rows to rot the stem. This is called ‘spreading flax,’ a very backbreaking work, as I can attest as I have done a great amount of it.”
And that is only the beginning of a very long, complex and exhaustive process which will be explored with Maj. Gen. Stanley in the next column — when we REALLY work up a sweat!
(Paul Locher, of Wooster, Ohio, is a lifelong journalist who spent 45 years as a writer for a daily newspaper. In addition, he spent decades covering significant antique auctions and shows for major antiques publications. He is an ardent collector of early American antiques, a lecturer, an author of numerous books, a co-superintendent of the antiques department for the Wayne County Fair and is a director and the curator of the Buckeye Agricultural Museum and Education Center in Wooster.
