Weavers and creelers: Exhibit on mill work set
Museum asks for photos and tools from era
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 07-16-05
Linda Norris continues gathering items for an exhibit on life in Amsterdam when the community was known as the Carpet City with thousands employed at Mohawk Carpets and Bigelow Sanford.
Opening Labor Day at the Walter Elwood Museum at 300 Guy Park Avenue, the exhibit will be called “A Complicated Weave” and will focus on the kinds of jobs and different ethnic groups who worked in the carpet mills and other factories in Amsterdam.
“It is like a carpet in a way, the strands of life in the mill,” Norris said. “Weavers had to work with others in the mill—creelers, loom fixers, spare hands. And those threads extended out into the community.”
A professional museum exhibit designer from Treadwell, New York, Norris already has received what she called “wonderful contributions,” including a photo of young creel boys or creelers from the 1890s, a collection of trophies and photographs from the American Lithuanian Club and a calendar from a Polish grocery store and butcher shop.
Creelers helped carpet weavers, tying weaver’s knots to set up the looms and performing other tasks. In the early days, boys aged 12 to 14 did this kind of work. In the 1930s, child labor laws were enforced and many women took up creeling.
The American Lithuanian Club has contributed sports trophies from the 1930s, a large photo of the club’s basketball team from the 1920s and memorabilia from the club’s theatrical productions.
A 1949 calendar showing a pretty woman holding two puppies was printed for Joseph and Helen Bogdan’s grocery store and meat market at 44 ½ Milton Avenue on Park Hill, one of the city’s Polish neighborhoods. With only the market’s address and phone number in English, the calendar displays a New Year greeting and advertises Bogdan’s store in Polish.
Norris said: “We’re still looking for photographs, work tools from factories other than the carpet mills, particularly knitting mills, like Chalmers and glove factories like Fownes. We're interested in showing people at work in the factory, and the tools and/or clothing they wore to work.”
The museum has received two kinds of homemade canvas aprons that women workers used who wound yarn onto spools in the carpet mills. The women cut knots off the yarn and stuffed the waste knots into pockets in the aprons. Norris is told that a “ring knife” was used to cut the knots and she hopes to secure this tool for display.
Norris also would like to find more photos from mills other than carpet mills. And she would like more union material including union badges, picket signs and photographs of union meetings or activities.
“We have a (union) membership card,” Norris said. “We have a whole scrapbook of clippings—but no pictures of the 1952 strike.” The big strike by members of the Textile Workers Union of America lasted for twelve weeks.
The Elwood exhibit will focus on everyday people and Norris is collecting photographs and objects from neighborhoods, including stores, clubs, churches and family or community activities.
“There are lots of photographs of Main Street and lots of photographs of the carpet mills,” Norris said. “ But historic photographs of neighborhoods, of people at family picnics, people sitting on their front porch have proven unexpectedly hard to come by.”
She is interested, too, in home movies and promises to return all photos. If you have material to share, contact the Elwood Museum at 843-5151.
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