Daily Kennebec Journal

A recent visitor to the French settlement in northeastern Maine, visited a woman ninety-seven years old and entirely blind. He found her sitting in her rocking chair, very busily engaged in picking to pieces a piece of old yarn with a large needle. Beside her lay a small quantity of hair that had been carded from the cattle, and a small amount of wool. Her daughter sat spinning this composition into yarn to be knit into fine socks, as they say.

The method of preparing this stock for the wheel is rather amusing. After picking to pieces old yarn and woolen cloth, it is mixed with enough good wool to "galvanize" it. Then it is put in an old-fashioned dash churn, soap and water applied, and churned until it is ready for the cards; then it goes to the wheel, the same that was used by grandmothers of old for spinning flax.

The women of upper Aroostook are very industrious and great help-meets, as many times they can be seen at work in the field, planting, hoeing, haying, harvesting, and as a general thing, they manufacture their wool into cloth, sacks and mittens. Many whole families are clothed in wool of their own manufacture. Many card wool by hand, spin with the old flax wheel and weave with the old loom that has been in use for hundreds of years.