From Stalk to Spinning Wheel: The Ancient Art of Flax Comes Home to Gilmanton
By Alyson Short
You have likely been talking about flax your whole life without realizing it. Ever called someone a towhead? That’s flax. Ever admired a flaxen-haired beauty? Flax again, right there in the name. Had your ‘hackles raised’? Believe it or not, also flax! Tow is the short, pale, flyaway fiber left behind during a hackling, one step in the process of turning flax into linen. Those wispy strands bear an uncanny resemblance to the hair of a certain kind of small child, which is how the term towhead entered our language. Hackles were the sharp combs used to separate and straighten flax fibers before spinning. Some of us may have known where those words came from; most of us probably didn’t.
Like language itself, many of the everyday processes that once shaped people’s lives have faded from common memory. We know shirts come from factories and factories come from somewhere, here or overseas, but few of us understand the full journey from raw material to finished cloth in the tactile, practical sense of “I could actually do this if I had to.”
Our great-great-grandmothers did not have that problem. They grew the flax, pulled it from the field, retted it, broke it, hackled it, spun it, wove it, and wore it. The entire chain from seed to shirt passed through their own hands and the hands of their neighbors. This July, thanks to the Gilmanton Historical Society, you can watch every link in that chain come to life right here in the Lakes Region, on the very land where it was practiced two centuries ago.
The 5th Annual Farm and Flax Day, and special for this year, a Daughters of Liberty Spinning Bee, takes place Saturday, July 25, 10 am to 3 pm, at the Farm Museum at Tom Howe Conservation Area, 245 Meetinghouse Road, Gilmanton. Rain date is Sunday, July 26. It is free, open to all ages, and the kind of event that sounds educational and turns out to actually be fun, which is the best kind.
Members of the Flax and Linen Community will be on hand, demonstrating the full processing sequence as it was practiced here more than two hundred years ago. And “full sequence” is not an exaggeration. Processing flax into linen thread is a multi-stage affair that starts in the field and ends at the spinning wheel, with a remarkable number of steps in between, each one requiring specific tools and hard-won knowledge. The fact that anyone ever figured any of this out — through observation, through trial and error, through generations of hands-on knowledge passed from parent to child — is something worth stopping to appreciate.
Here is the short version, for those of us who have never given much thought to where linen comes from: Flax is a slender, pretty plant; blue flowers, easy to grow, wildly useful, whose stems contain long, strong bast fibers (think of the long strings of a more graceful and elegant celery) that, once separated and spun, become linen thread. The trick is getting those fibers out. They’re bound inside the stalk by a natural pectin, and the time-honored way to dissolve that bond is “retting”: soaking or spreading the harvested stalks so that moisture and natural bacterial action can break down everything that isn’t fiber. Colonial farmers retted flax in ponds and slow-moving streams, or spread it across dewy fields for several weeks, checking and turning the bundles with the practiced eye of someone who knew the difference between “done” and “ruined.” It is impressive. The difference between smelly glob and future fine linen is skilled work that looks, from the outside, a lot like waiting.
After retting comes “breaking”, which is bending the dried stalks through a wooden flax brake to shatter the brittle, woody core. Then “scutching,” beating the broken stalks to knock away the chaff. Then “hackling,” drawing the fibers through beds of iron teeth to comb out the short, tangled tow fibers from the long, silky line flax that was ready for spinning. Each step has its own tools, its own rhythm, its own particular way of separating what’s useful from what isn’t. All of it will be on demonstration at the Farm Day, using actual period tools and actual flax, in the hands of people who have learned these processes the same way colonial farmers did: by doing them, over and over, until they knew.
The site itself earns a moment of reflection. During colonial times, flax was grown and processed at this very location. Gilmanton, incorporated in 1727, was farming country through and through, and the land around Meetinghouse Road has a long memory. Watching these demonstrations happen on the ground where they actually happened — not in a recreation, not in a museum, but in the place, is marvelous. New Englanders know well that history feels more real when you’re standing in it.
This year’s event carries extra meaning, falling as it does in the year of America’s 250th birthday. To mark the occasion, the Gilmanton Historical Society is hosting a Daughters of Liberty Spinning Bee — a tribute to one of the more quietly radical acts of the colonial era. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, colonial women organized public spinning bees as a form of protest against British taxation. By spinning their own thread and producing their own cloth, they were making a political statement with their hands: we don’t need your goods, and we’re not going to buy them. Women who had no formal political voice found one at the spinning wheel. It is a remarkable piece of history, and it deserves to be remembered the way Farm Day remembers it, as a demonstration.
The Spinning Bee is open to registered participants, and yes, there are real cash prizes: $100 for first place, $75 for second, $50 for third, $25 for fourth, awarded to whoever spins the longest thread in twenty minutes. Flax and wool competitions run at noon and 1 pm, with the communal Bee at 2 pm. Bring your own spindle for the competition, your own wheel for the Bee; fiber is provided on site. Registration is open now at gilmantonhistoricalsociety.org.
Whether you come to watch the flax processing, cheer on the spinners, or simply spend a summer Saturday in a beautiful corner of New Hampshire learning something genuinely worth knowing, the 5th Annual Farm and Flax Day is the kind of local event that reminds you why local events matter. These skills, this knowledge, these hands, all connect us to something real and long and larger than ourselves. The least we can do is show up, pay attention, and earn some reverence for all that has come before (and never take a linen napkin for granted again!) Children will love the event as well, as it features child-friendly interactive demos (including nail-making with the blacksmith!), a Ukrainian children’s story, and other family-friendly elements.
The event is free and generously sponsored by ArborTech. For more information and to register for the Spinning Bee, visit gilmantonhistoricalsociety.org. The Farm Museum at Tom Howe Conservation Area is located at 245 Meetinghouse Road, Gilmanton.
For simplicity and extra (and enthusiastic!) encouragement to attend, all event details are here:
5th Annual Farm & Flax Day — Daughters of Liberty Spinning Bee
When: Saturday, July 25, 10 am – 3 pm, Rain date: Sunday, July 26
Where: Farm Museum at Tom Howe Conservation Area, 245 Meetinghouse Road, Gilmanton, NH
Admission: Free and open to the public
Spinning Bee registration: gilmantonhistoricalsociety.org
Sponsored by ArborTech