The Doffer's Hour
Dobson Mills
“The trade kept both halves of a pair the rest of English has almost lost.”
About the Book
At the Dobson Mills, five miles above Philadelphia’s Centre Square, nobody kept time by the clock. They kept it by the frames. A frame on a coarse count filled its bobbins in forty minutes, a fine one in two or three hours, and when the frames were ready the doffing gang came round and took the full bobbins off. The gang was almost always children, or girls in their teens. The frames decided. The children followed.
Doff is do off. Don is do on. The trade kept both halves of a pair the rest of English has almost lost.
John and James Dobson came out of the Yorkshire worsted country, and by the 1890s their works covered some thirty acres by the Schuylkill and employed more than five thousand hands. Here is how that yarn got made, one machine at a time. A sorter grades a single fleece into six to ten qualities by feel, under north light, because north light does not flatter. Then the card, and the comb, and the drawing that takes a rope of wool down to a thread. Then the mule, whose carriage ran out five feet and back twice a minute all day, and came back on a fixed cycle whether or not the smallest child in the room, under it with a brush, was clear.
Spinster. Tenterhooks. Unkempt. Shoddy. The words survived. In Kensington almost none of the mills did. The looms went for scrap. The vaults are still there.
Other Books in A Field Guide to Vanished Trades
- Book XXXVII The Stetson Hat Company