The Merchants’ Manufacturer: The Barrett Family’s Dyeing Businesses in Massachusetts and New York, 1790-1850

Abstract

This work explores the nature and evolution of the independent dyeing service industry in the early United States through a case study of the Barrett companies in Malden, Massachusetts and in Staten Island, New York from the 1790s to 1850. I analyze published and unpublished sources to answer basic questions about this little-studied industry and these businesses in particular: How did they operate? What factors influenced their opportunities, challenges, and successes? What was the relationship of the dyeing service industry to merchants and to textile factories in New England? And how did the fortunes of the businesses and the family change over time? Beginning in the 1790s, new trade opportunities for American merchants drove increases in imports of cloth from Europe and the East Indies, which in turn expanded opportunities for urban dyers to help merchants and households refurbish or repurpose valuable cloth, clothing, and household goods. Merchants engaged dyeing services—which involved coloring with natural dyes, and also bleaching, cleaning, and cloth finishing—to add value to goods that were faded, shopworn, dirty, or had been damaged in shipping. Men and women in elite or middling households, as well as businesses such as hotels, also used these services to transform their used clothes and furnishings into new and fashionable ones, avoiding the cost of new cloth. To meet the needs of elite customers, dyers worked with a wide range of fabrics and needed to produce colors and finishes matching or at least approaching the quality of imported cloth. In the first decades of the nineteenth century especially, these dyers were held to a high standard and needed a wider array of skills than did New England’s industrializing cloth manufacturers, who could limit their scope. Knowledge transfer by traveling European dyers along with the dissemination of print materials helped American dyers enter the trade and keep up with European dyeing and finishing processes, while improvements in transportation and communication helped expand their customer reach. Having little to do with American textile manufacturers, independent dyers’ interests were closely aligned with those of their merchant customers. In addition to facilitating dyers’ expansion and publicity, merchants took advantage of dyeing and later printing to reduce their risk, improve profitability of their import/export ventures, and influence tariff policy in their favor. But it was the steady custom in household dyeing that in fact drove day-to-day profits for dyers and ultimately subsidized the reduction of merchant risk. Profits and prices were highest from 1800 to 1820, declining gradually in the following decades due to increasing competition and to diverse other factors including the decline in prices of cloth and clothing. The skilled dyeing workforce was paid well and resisted deskilling. As the capital needed to start a dyeing business declined, some employees quit and became competitors, contributing to saturation of the market in the 1840s. Beyond exposing one aspect of early nineteenth-century material culture and illuminating challenges facing a little-known industry’s business owners and workers, this study complicates our understanding of how merchant capital influenced industrialization. First, some merchants navigated the transforming political economy not only by investing in manufacturing, but also by choosing industries that fostered profit in their import/export activities. Second, import substitution industrialization took multiple forms during this period, some of which benefited merchants more than canonical producers such as the New England textile manufacturers.