Watching Flax Grow in New Hampshire

For the last several months Kimberly Alexander and her classes at the University of New Hampshire have been exploring a staple crop of colonial New England: flax.

Following a student’s suggestion, the team started growing flax (as well as cotton, rye, and indigo) in partnership with the university’s Sustainable Agriculture program.

Further steps will include harvesting, stooking, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling the flax to make enough fibers to spin into linen thread and possibly weave into cloth.

As those unfamiliar terms suggest, flax requires its own processes, dictated by the plant’s needs and traits. The stalks have to be dried, soaked just right, dried again, and then knocked around to leave only the useful long fibers.

In colonial America that work was usually left to women, children, and enslaved workers. The only detail I can remember from past reading is that young farmworkers tending flax were trained to walk backwards so that their toes wouldn‘t catch and yank up the stalks.

The project has its own blog with such content as:

• an interview with Shirley Walker, sharing lessons from processing flax for the Canterbury Shaker Village and the New Hampshire Farm Museum.
• a survey of mentions of flax in the diary of farmer Matthew Patten (1719–1795).
• an examination of linen garments belonging to the Stratham Historical Society.

As the university’s article on the program says, this project is expected to run through next spring. The big question will be how much useable fiber all that effort will produce.