Machine moving day !

Early Textiles now open

We are delighted to announce that the Early Textiles section of the museum is now open on the top floor of the museum. Visit our 18th century weavers cottage and learn how textiles were made before industrialisation.

The exhibits illustrate the progress of the local textile industry during the period from the early to mid-eighteenth century when the local clothiers were rapidly introducing worsted goods into the area, through to the first adoption of the power loom around 1830. Many of the machines on display were originally invented for use in the cotton industry and were later able to be modified for use, first in making worsted goods and later for woollen production.

The typical eighteenth-century local weaver would not have had a farm, but depended almost entirely upon weaving, marketing his cloth through a factor or middleman rather than travelling to the cloth hall as his predecessors had done.

Wool textiles were probably being made in Calderdale soon after it was first settled. The earliest surviving evidence showed the town had a thriving woollen textile industry by 1150. By the 1470s the Parish of Halifax was paying tax on more cloths than any other town in the West and East Ridings of Yorkshire. In the 1550s, Heptonstall had a woollen cloth hall and Halifax both a woollen hall and a linen hall, all three set up by the Lord of the Manor. A document of 1588 revealed that wool from the local sheep was considered too coarse to be used and was sold to ‘the men of Rochdale’; instead, most supplies were obtained from Lincolnshire, along with some of the finest wools from Craven. Worsted products were first introduced to this area in the late seventeenth century from East Anglia, augmenting existing woollen trade here and was well established by the 1720s. By the late eighteenth century, cotton spinning was another new textile process, introduced into the upper parts of the Calder and Ryburn valleys to take advantage of the availability of water power for the building of new mills. Water power was introduced for the spinning of worsted yarn in the Calder valley during the 1790s. At the start of the nineteenth century, a burgeoning carpet industry began to use jute as backing material for carpets. In 1830, Benjamin Outram succeeded in spinning and weaving alpaca fibres at his mill near Greetland, though with little financial reward. In the middle of the nineteenth century, silk began to be used in some worsted fabrics, prompting the establishment of several silk spinning mills near Hebden Bridge, Brighouse and also the Ryburn valley. During the twentieth century, numerous synthetic yarns were developed and began to be combined with, or replaced natural fibres.

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