The cocoons were then unwound and the threads prepared for use. A day or two later they were carefully picked and the worms killed by boiling or steaming. In about 31 days from the hatching of the worms, during which time they fed upon the mulberry leaves, they formed the cocoon, which took but three days. Here were the tables and shelves upon which the leaves were spread, and on which the worms were placed to feed. A large building with the siding boards on hinges, resembling a tobacco barn, stood near the brow of the present New Terrace at a point near the street leading from School Street. The leaves were plucked at particular times and fed to the worms. H., and there was a splendid specimen of rather large size growing on the Saxtons River road. Within a few years, a medium-sized mulberry tree of this variety was still growing and bearing fruit at Alstead, N.
When left to ripen, the fruit looked similar to the blackberry, only longer and without the objectional seeds. The trees varied in height from 2 to 20 feet, looking at a distance something like an orchard of apple trees of various sizes. The company set out very thickkly all over the land now known as the "New Terrace," a variety of mulberry trees, the leaves of which are the principal food of the silk worm. The propagation of the silk worm at Bellows Falls was by methods identical with those still in vogue in China and British India, the great silk-producing countries of the world. Artemus Robbins, a local physician who had accumulated considerable property, and Rufus Guild, a local merchant.
The two leading spirits in the enterprise were Dr.
The largest venture in this vicinity was made about 1838, when a number of citizens of Bellows Falls attempted it and continued the business four or five years. At that time, as in various other decades, there was a wave of excitement in many places in the United States over the idea that fortunes could be made in this industry here as well as in other countries, but it has almost uniformly proved disastrous in this country. Hayes, Tuttle Co., Marble City Press, Rutland, VT., 1929, page 306:īELLOWS FALLS ONCE BRED SILK WORMS AND PRODUCED REAL SILKįor some years between 18 Bellows Falls produced a quantity of silk, made from the coocoons of silk worm.
From The Connecticut River Valley in Southern Vermont and New Hampshire: Historical Sketches by Lyman S.
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