Woolen Mills dam

August 16,2007, 7:00AM

This generally was the pattern growth for the American wool manufacture. Yet, like the spread of civilization on the frontier, that development was re-enacted at successive periods in various sections as economic immaturity yielded to local and sectional desires to be as self-sustaining as possible. In New England, fumbling beginnings in wool manufacturing had preceded the Revolutionary War, but not until the War of 1812 emphasized the necessity of becoming more independent of English industrialism did that section receive a real impetus to wool manufacturing. The South was years behind New England, continuing even today to draw its first quality goods from the North. Still later as the frontier advanced farther from the Atlantic seaboard during the nineteenth century, small mills sprang up in the rural West to supply local needs in much the same fashion as those of the 1815 period in the East.--Harry Poindexter