"Raw newly-shorn wool in medieval times was fulled by being placed in large vats full of cattle urine, and stomped about by the bare feet of the unfortunate fuller who, we trust, bathed before the wine harvest came in."
Did you grow up in a residential population dense enough to support a Fuller Brush man?
In the 1940s and early ‘50s (the years of my childhood) in the suburbs of most North American cities, dads worked away from the house and moms stayed home doing all the work that would eventually be made easier and briefer by the invention of automatic washers and driers, no-iron fabrics, automatic controls on ovens and coffee pots, and blenders and food processors on kitchen counters. Kids, in summer and after school, played in the neighborhood where everybody knew everybody, and anybody’s mom could grab you and give you a good whack if you misbehaved on her turf. Then she’d phone your mom, who’d thank her.
Families had one car, and the dads usually drove them to work. Milk and other dairy products came to the house with the milkman. Bread and other baked goods came with the Cushman’s bakery truck. Shopping for groceries happened once a week (with visits to the butcher, the greengrocer, the fish market, the hardware store. There were no supermarkets yet when I was little.
A man in a stinky truck came Mondays to take away the food garbage, another a day or two later, in a different truck, to take away inorganic trash, though we didn’t know the word “inorganic” back then.
A man came periodically to read the water meter down in our basement, another to read the gas meter also down in the basement. Jim Lyons, the mailman, came afoot twice a day.
And then there was the Fuller Brush man. He carried a bulky sample case full of brushes of every imaginable shape and function from little ones for teeth, fingernails, baby bottles, and shirt collars, to catalog illustrations of the bigger brushes for toilets, floors, sidewalks, and driveways. He’d ring the doorbell, be invited in, and write down orders. Our moms always offered a glass of water (he may have been an infrequent visitor, but he was both familiar and welcome).
And we took his title for granted, as if it were one word: the Fullerbrushman. It wasn’t until I was studying philology that it occurred to me to wonder where people’s names originated, names like Cartwright, Boulanger, Aptheker (remember Bettina Aptheker, Mark Rudd’s Berkeley communist companion in hippie San Francisco?), and also Glover, Fletcher – and Fuller. Carpenter was easy. Butler we learned when we were old enough to read English novels. If you don’t know what a fletcher is, ask a bow hunter. Cartwright, Wheeler, and Glover took longer, Boulanger and Apteker even longer still (boulanger was a French baker; Aptheker was a Yiddish-speaking apothecary or pharmacist).
Then, reading John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) in an 18th century literature course, I encountered the phrase "fuller’s earth" and had to look it up.
It is a super-absorbent, naturally-occurring clay, a form of aluminum silicate, that has the property of soaking up, among other things, oil. A fuller, in earlier centuries, was a man who used fuller’s earth to clean and de-grease freshly-shorn wool before it was combed into long strands, spun into yarn, and woven into cloth.
The founder of the eponymous brush factory in Hartford, Conn., in 1906, and whose salesman visited my mom, was Alfred Fuller, one of whose ancient ancestors was a wool scrubber and got named for his trade, much as most people named Smith are descended, anciently, from a blacksmith, a goldsmith, maybe an armorer.
Several months ago, in this newspaper, your publisher wrote of the community of mills that once throve in Ewells Hollow, just off the Danville-Peacham Road. It appears that the earliest of the mills in that location was built by the brothers Joseph and Hugh Matthews. They were fullers, and their fulling mill (1796) cleaned and degreased raw, newly-shorn wool.
Occasionally an item on a TV news broadcast is preceded by a warning, “Some viewers may find the following item unsuitable for [usually] children.” So if you are of delicate sensibility, be warned. Before the discovery of the beneficial properties of fuller’s earth, the job of the fuller was one of the most odious on earth. Raw newly-shorn wool in medieval times was fulled by being placed in large vats full of cattle urine, and stomped about by the bare feet of the unfortunate fuller who, we trust, bathed before the wine harvest came in.
To return now to a more benign way of proceeding, the Matthews brothers, even in 1796, had a much better process: swooshing raw wool in cool water and fuller’s earth not only removes a substantial amount of the wool’s natural oily lanolin (and dirt, such as what’s found near the hindquarters of sheep). It also causes the wool fibers to cling more closely to one another, making the wool denser. This thickening effect, particularly in the case of already-woven woolen cloth, necessarily shrinks it. Controlled fulling with boiling water alters entire bolts of finished woolen cloth, making them much denser, suitable for cutting and sewing into, for example, Navy pea coats, or German Loden coats. This is another process that has appropriated the verb to full. It’s not clear if only one or both of these two fulling processes were going on in 1796 in Ewell’s Hollow.
The raw wool that was being brought to the Matthews’ mill was local. Raising sheep, shearing, washing, carding, spinning and weaving were still a small-farm enterprise. The sheep that had been transported to North America, and to Caledonia County with the original Scots settlers must have been of the same few breeds of sheep that clothed and fed the Scandanavians, the peoples of northernmost Britain, Scotland, the islands to Scotland’s north and west, and Iceland. These sheep were modest sized animals, well adapted to living in the harsh climates of extreme northern Europe, and so to New England’s rough terrain as well. They tended to forage in a more solitary manner than the breeds we know today that flock together under a bellwether’s leadership.
These ancient breeds’ outer hair was longer, straighter, and coarser, hence better at shedding water; the inner undercoat was soft, thick, and warm. Because these breeds had thriven in harsh northern climates for so many generations, they had evolved an especially thick winter coat that had to be shed once warmer weather returned. And so their wool had also evolved, by nature to shed gradually come spring, rubbing off on tree trunks and shrubs if the beasts were left alone.
For shepherds, however, this meant that come spring, the fleece, loosening naturally, could be tugged off, often in one entire piece, by hand. It wasn’t generally very nice wool. It required not only cleaning by the fuller but also a lot of carding to separate the long, coarse outer hair that repelled rain and snow from the thicker softer under coat that kept the sheep, and later the clothing wearer, warm. If you’ve ever owned an authentic Irish fisherman’s sweater, or an Icelandic woolen sweater, you are familiar with the relatively coarse water-shedding wool, and the natural colors (brown, gray, black and white) of these breeds.
But the woolen trade that had led to the development of small water-powered mills such as the fulling mill in Ewell’s Hollow, was soon to be expanded. By the end of the 18th century, America was growing in population, in developed land, in industrial scope, and, needless to say, in an ever-expanding need for fabrics for, primarily, clothing, blankets and felted hats (think tricorns). By 1800, Vermont had become the principal sheep farming region in the United States, and instead of a trade, wool had expanded into an agribusiness.
Thomas Jefferson’s ambassador to Spain, Col. David Humphries, a gentleman farmer as were so many of our nation’s early leaders, noted that even the commonplace, everyday woolen fabrics of Spain and Portugal were of an excellent quality. It was wool that appeared but rarely in America, and then mostly imported and heavily taxed. He learned that Spain’s Merino sheep stock were jealously protected by royal fiat from export, and that only shorn wool could leave the country. But Humphries succeeded, nevertheless, in purchasing, 21 Merino rams and 70 Merino ewes that he shipped to his Connecticut farm in 1802. Subsequently, in 1809, William Jarvis, America’s consul in Lisbon, Portugal, purchased and shipped to his Weathersfield farm several hundred Merino sheep which became the foundation breedstock for most American Merino sheep flocks. The Merino fleeces shorn on Vermont’s expanding farms were eventually fulled, carded, spun and woven at woolen mills all over the northeast, from the Bolton Mill in Danville’s Greenbanks Hollow to the multi-story brick mills that lined many stretches of the Merrimac River and its tributaries in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The most seaward of the Merrimac woolen mills, by the way, lay so close to the river mouth at the Atlantic that the river water lapped the building’s foundation as it rose and fell with the tides. That was the Merrimac Hat Factory in Amesbury, Mass., which once employed 500 people and continued to manufacture men’s felted woolen hats until it went under in the 1950s. The end of felted wool hats on men’s heads was no doubt heavily influenced by John F. Kennedy’s invariable and unruly bare-headedness.
Back to Vermont. Until a few months ago when a trail and a historic marker appeared, there was nothing left of the mills and shops in Ewell’s Hollow. There’s nothing but a marker left of the massive mill in Greenbanks Hollow. Vermont’s elegant Ibex three-season woolen clothing, until recently a front window standout item at quality shops such as Moose River Lake & Lodge in St. Johnsbury, has gone out of business. The mills along the Merrimac produce software, not soft clothing. There remains the Johnson Woolen Mill and its retail store in Johnson. And, fortunately, as always, an army of home industries, artisans and artists, spinners, weavers, sewers, felters, knitters. As we said in the olden days: do give them your custom.
Peggy Pearl’s excellent Curriculum Guide entitled Sheep in Vermont that she prepared in 2003 for the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium has been a valuable source for a number of items in this article, and I thank her.
Bill Biddle is a retired teacher who worked at Northeastern University and Harvard. After moving to Vermont with his wife, artist Sharon Kenney Biddle, he co-led the Wilderness Program at St. Johnsbury Academy and taught writing at Lyndon State College.
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