Women

Women Artisans in Backcountry North Carolina, 1753-1790

JOHANNA MILLER LEWIS

[Vol. 68 (1991), 214-236]

IN A MINUTE spared from running her busy household and tavern, Elizabeth Steele walked over to see Ann Crosby, a seamstress working in Salisbury during the 1760s, and picked up a dress she had ordered from Crosby some weeks before. Although the dress was for everyday wear, Steele could afford the luxury of having Crosby make it from specially ordered fabric at the cost of six shillings four pence a yard.¹

Was the preceding scene an unlikely occurrence in the pre-Revolutionary South? Had Elizabeth Steele and Ann Crosby resided in Williamsburg, Annapolis, or Charles Town, the acknowledged urban centers of the colonial South, the scene would be a familiar one. In a chapter on southern artisans in his book The Colonial Craftsman, Carl Bridenbaugh argues that outside of those urban areas, the agricultural and rural nature of the South made it difficult for craftspeople to develop a big enough clientele to survive.² And yet Steele and Crosby lived far away from the urban communities of Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina; they lived in Rowan County, deep in the backcountry of North Carolina.

The difference in geographical area brings a whole new significance to the exchange between Ann Crosby and Elizabeth Steele, because of the scarcity of craftspeople in the rural South. Bridenbaugh maintains that, in the back settlements, outside of “basic needs almost no crafts developed.”³ Not only were village craftsmen unable “to satisfy the demands of the southern backcountry in the colonial period,” but “families of farmers [also] were forced to develop mechanical skills” just to maintain basic standards of living.⁴ Bridenbaugh, however, underestimated the prevalence of artisans on the frontier. In fact, research in Rowan County court minutes, wills, and deeds as well as surviving eighteenth-century invoices indicates that artisans played a significant role in increasing the quality of life in the backcountry of North Carolina. More importantly, as the exchange between Steele and Crosby proves, women worked as professional artisans in Rowan County. Employed mainly in the textile arts, women even held a monopoly on the craft of spinning in the backcountry.

The image of artisans working in the backcountry seems incongruous with the traditional reputation of the backcountry as a rugged frontier where settlers fought to survive in the wilderness. Many authors, both historic and contemporary, have depicted the backcountry as a society devoid of civilization. Early accounts of the frontier with those types of descriptions abound. When William Byrd wrote about his experiences in the History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, conditions, no doubt, were crude. “I beheld the wretchedest Scene of Poverty I had ever met with in this happy Part of the World. The Man, his Wife, and Six Small Children, liv’d in a Penn, like so many Cattle, without any Roof over their Heads but that of Heaven. And this was their airy Residence in the Day time, but then there was a Fodder Stack not far from this Inclosure, in which the whole Family shelter’d themselves a night’s and in bad weather.”⁵

Another theme that emerges from many descriptions of the early settlers in the backcountry (especially the male ones) is the idle and shiftless manner in which they lived. Byrd was particularly critical of settlers’ work habits: “We saw no Drones there, which are but too Common, alas, in that Part of the World. Tho’, in truth, the Distemper of Laziness seizes the Men oftener much than the Women. These last Spin, weave and knit, all with their own Hands, while their Husbands, depending on the Bounty of the Climate, are Sloathfull in every thing but getting of Children, and in that only Instance make themselves useful Members of an Infant-Colony.”⁶ As late as 1766 the Reverend Charles Woodmason described “all new Settlers” near present-day Camden, South Carolina, as “extremely poor—Live in Logg Cabins like Hogs— and their Living and Behaviour as rude or more so than the Savages.”⁷

Research using these eighteenth-century accounts of the backcountry has led historians to characterize the region and its society in like terms. If living conditions were so primitive, artisans must not have inhabited the backcountry. Historian Julia Cherry Spruill left a vivid description of frontier life in her 1938 book Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies.

It was the housewife of the back settlements who had to depend most upon her own labor and ingenuity. The frontiersman’s remoteness from waterways and highways and his lack of a marketable staple crop prevented his trading much with the outside world and made it necessary for him and his wife to produce almost everything consumed in their household. With broadaxe and jackknife, he made his cabin, furniture, and many of the farming implements and kitchen utensils; and with spinning wheel, loom, and dyepots, she made all the clothing of the family, the household linen, blankets, quilts, coverlets, curtains, rugs, and other such furnishings.⁸

In North Carolina: The History of a Southern State, one of the most widely used reference books on the history of the state, Hugh T. Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome tell a similar story. “The small farmer and his family were engaged in self-sufficient or subsistence farming. They cleared the forest, tilled the soil, produced the bare necessities of life, and eked out a living—sometimes successfully and in an orderly way, but frequently ‘in the most slovenly manner.’... They had few conveniences and no luxuries; what they could not produce they simply did without.”⁹

Lately, the political and economic turmoil of backcountry life has become a popular topic for historians. Most of the recent work has focused on the violent, tumultuous nature of the backcountry as a place that engaged people in a constant struggle for power, highlighted by the Regulator movement and the American Revolution. Topics dealing with common, everyday life in the backcountry, such as the position, or even the existence, of artisans, still have not been probed.¹⁰ The only exception is the body of work dealing with the Moravians, the religious group that settled the Wachovia tract in the 1750s and did its best to ignore the outside world, while creating a prosperous community of farmers, artisans, and coreligionists.¹¹

The dearth of scholarship on everyday society and economy in the backcountry notwithstanding, artisans in early America, especially in the colonial South, have generated a fair amount of interest over the years because of the issue of bound labor versus free labor. Outside of urban areas, the sparse settlement patterns caused by a heavy economic reliance on agriculture did not provide a large enough clientele for artisans to survive. The wealthy owners of large plantations often imported high-quality consumer goods from England and used local craftspeople to supply only their most basic needs. However, as most southern plantations depended on slave labor, the owners gradually realized that making their operations self-sufficient by training their slaves as artisans would be cheaper than patronizing local craftspeople. That investment also would provide some economic protection against the crop market. Recently, Jean Russo has pointed out that historians have reached an impasse in explaining the lack of free artisans and the search for plantation self-sufficiency: either the plantation owner’s choice to make his plantation self-sufficient with slave labor caused his reliance on free craftspeople to decline, sending those artisans into other endeavors or other locations, or the lack of free artisans forced the plantation owner to become self-sufficient, causing artisans to abandon their trades for planting. Either way, Russo concludes, the debate has failed to address the role of local craftspeople who remained in their rural communities, which she has done for Talbot County, Maryland, from 1690 to 1759.¹²

Through her innovative research, Russo answers a vital question in the historiographical debate over skilled slave labor versus skilled free labor in the Chesapeake. Not surprisingly, she found that artisans who practiced basic crafts (carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, weavers, and tailors) prevailed; and some secondary and allied crafts were also present for at least part of the time studied. The artisans’ fortunes might decline when the tobacco market prospered, for in such periods planters would acquire skilled slaves in an effort to expand the variety of plantation activity to buffer the extremes of depression. But the plantations (in Talbot County at least) were not self-sufficient and the economy and society were dependent on free artisans to provide them with the necessities of everyday life.¹³

Russo’s work is important in one other respect as well. Her dissertation does not merely scour the county records to construct a profile of how artisans, as an “inarticulate” group, fit into society, but it also provides a portrait of life for the artisan in Talbot County, Maryland.¹⁴

While Talbot County was a great distance from Rowan County, North Carolina, in the eighteenth century, Jean Russo’s conclusions about Chesapeake artisans are not without parallel in the backcountry South. Russo ascertained that a stable free artisan population did exist in an economy dominated by plantations, tobacco, and slaves. The purpose of this article is to prove that artisans, particularly women artisans, existed and consequently improved the quality of life in a region portrayed as lacking a market economy as well as most (if not all) of eighteenth-century life’s refinements.

To undertake such a study required that two criteria be met. First, a backcountry county must have complete court records. Second, the geographic area should encompass the Wachovia tract. A full complement of court records provides a better chance to identify more craftspeople; and the known artisan population of the Moravians provides a point of comparison with the rest of the region. Rowan County met these criteria. It encompassed almost the entire northwest quadrant of North Carolina when it was formed from Anson County in 1753, and deeds, wills, and minutes of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions, as well as other legal documents, have survived.¹⁵

Rowan County comprised approximately the western half of the Granville tract, the land given to John Carteret, Earl Granville, one of the eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina, when he refused to sell his share of the colony back to the crown in 1729. Yet, the Blue Ridge Mountains prevented settlement of the western portions of the tract. The number of land grants made by Granville in Rowan County totaled only 750 out of 5,000 grants issued for the entire tract.¹⁶ In the eighteenth century most settlement took place between the Catawba and Yadkin rivers in the piedmont, known for its rolling countryside marked by rounded hills, ridges, rivers, and streams.¹⁷ The land between these two rivers was extremely fertile and well watered. The forests featured oak, pine, and hickory trees. Those superior natural resources; the rising land prices in earlier settled colonies; and the route of the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia through western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Valley of Virginia directly into that area of North Carolina brought a flood of immigrants to settle in the interior of the state.¹⁸ So many people came, in fact, that Rowan County almost quadrupled in population between 1754 and 1770. The ethnic composition of the immigrants constituted one of the most outstanding characteristics of backcountry society. The Scotch-Irish and Germans, rather than the English, predominated.¹⁹ Another important feature of Rowan County society was the lack of slaves in comparison to eastern North Carolina or even the backcountry counties east of the Yadkin River, such as Granville. In 1767, out of an estimated population of 13,516 in Rowan County, only 719 (5.3 percent) were blacks. With an estimated total population of 5,902, Granville County included 1,712 blacks (29 percent).²⁰

In 1755 Lord Granville, through his agents William Churton and Richard Vigers, conveyed 655 acres to trustees James Carter (a millwright) and Hugh Forster (a saddler) to establish the town of Salisbury, where the courthouse and jail had been constructed. Salisbury was laid out later in that year.²¹ Writing to the Board of Trade about his tour of the colony in the fall of 1755, Governor Arthur Dobbs remarked, “I arrived at Salisbury, the County town of Rowan the Town is but just laid out, the Court House built and 7 or 8 log Houses erected....”²² Within eleven years Salisbury developed enough to be designated one of six borough towns in the colony, allowing Rowan County a third representative to the assembly.²³

Rowan County (including Salisbury) was a vital, active, burgeoning place during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. However, as the westernmost county in the colony, Rowan was also most decidedly a backcountry, if not frontier, area. The settlers who were responsible for Rowan’s growth and development were mainly farmers; their success was achieved not by maintaining a subsistence level of existence but by producing enough corn, wheat, and other agricultural products to trade or export for a profit.²⁴ Yet, historians continually portray the backcountry resident as so isolated that everything he needed had to be homemade.

Perhaps the ethnographic composition of the population, coupled with its frontier location and its late settlement (in comparison to eastern North Carolina), has added to the myth of a subsistence and survival-oriented backcountry society. However, a statistical profile of the artisans present in Rowan County (and the counties subsequently formed from it) does not support the traditional historical interpretation (see appendix A).²⁵ One hundred and twenty-four artisans in 23 professions were located in Rowan County by 1759; and a sample of those who appeared on a 1759 tax list confirms that 62 craftsmen practiced 17 trades. The majority of artisans participated in what would probably be considered “necessary” trades: nearly one third of all the craftspeople were in the clothing trades (clothiers, weavers, tailors, spinsters, or hatters); one fifth of the artisans processed or made finished goods out of leather by tanning, shoemaking, or making saddles; 14 percent were blacksmiths; approximately 14 percent were involved in building trades as either carpenters, millwrights, or joiners; 8 percent participated in allied wood trades as coopers; and 5.6 percent of the craftsmen were wagonmakers or wheelwrights. Even at that early date 3 percent of the artisans were involved in consumer item trades: two potters and two gunsmiths were successfully plying their crafts within the backcountry community.²⁶

Unfortunately, the majority of the Rowan County court records ignore the Moravian artisans because the Brethren did not go to court, or own land, or even pay their taxes individually; the leaders took care of all legal matters. Information on the Moravians has been gathered from the first two volumes of the Records of the Moravians in North Carolina and the Archives of the Moravian Church, Southern Province, in Winston-Salem. Interestingly, out of the 124 artisans in Rowan County in 1759, only 17 (14 percent) were Moravian. Although the Moravians may have had the largest assortment of artisans in a single location, they were not the exception to the lack of artisans in the backcountry that Carl Bridenbaugh portrays in The Colonial Craftsman.²⁷ In fact, the Moravians practiced only 14 professions out of the 23 present in Rowan County in 1759; and only 3 of those—bricklayer, brickmaker, and turner—were found solely in the Wachovia tract. Artisans not present among the Moravians in 1759 included a hatter, a joiner, a saddler, a wagonmaker, and a wheelwright.²⁸

By 1790 the overall profile of artisans in the backcountry had changed somewhat, but the details of that portrait had altered dramatically (see appendix B). Rowan County’s original area had been divided into all or parts of nine additional counties: Surry (1771), Guilford (1771), Burke (1777), Wilkes (1777), Lincoln (1779), Randolph (1779), Rockingham (1785), Iredell (1788), and Stokes (1789).²⁹ The number of trades present in the same geographical area increased from twenty-three to forty-seven, reflecting the greater variety of goods and services available to the region’s inhabitants. Each category of trade offered a wider selection of craftspeople who specialized in certain processes or products. For instance, blacksmiths were no longer the only metalworkers: locksmiths, tinsmiths, tinkers, pewterers, and cutlers could make for consumers exactly what they wanted and needed. Consumer trades dramatically expanded with cabinetmakers, chairmakers, silversmiths, clock and watchmakers, and artists. The continuing growth of the textile production trades (spinning, weaving, fulling, and dyeing) enabled them to remain the largest trade category when separated from the clothing trades. Consequently, the clothing trades, which added seamstresses, milliners, and mantua-makers, fell to the fifth largest trade category in the geographic area.³⁰

The years between 1759 and 1790 also marked the introduction of women artisans into the public record. Outside of the Moravians, only one woman identified by a trade appears in Rowan County records prior to 1760. In a Rowan County deed dated April 31 [sic], 1756, Mary Boone, wife of Jonathan Boone, a joiner; sister-in-law to pioneer Daniel Boone; and daughter of James Carter, one of the richest men in the county, is identified as a spinster.³¹ Spinsters have often been overlooked as artisans because of the false attribution of the label to marital status. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a spinster primarily as ”A woman (or, rarely, a man) who spins, especially one who practises spinning as a regular occupation,” and only the second definition includes “Appended to names of women, originally in order to denote their occupation, but subsequently (from the 17th century) as the proper legal designation of one still unmarried.” Other historians have asserted that “No... woman defined herself or was defined as an artisan; all free women were categorized as spinsters or widows or were subsumed under their husband’s identity,”³² and “the skills of housewifery [included] primarily sewing and spinning.”³³ However, the records of Rowan County (and its subsequent counties) show that in backcountry North Carolina women were defined as artisans, and at least a few free married women were not totally subsumed by their husbands’ identities. Furthermore, research to delineate the differences between housewifery apprenticeships and spinning apprenticeships reveals that spinning may not have been a common skill of the housewife.

Mary Carter Boone is a perfect example of a woman who was defined as an artisan. Aside from practicing the trade of spinning, what other reason would there be for a married woman to be called a spinster? Or, why would three women—Annas Newberry, Jean Fergison, and Mary McCrerry—at least two of whom were married, all be identified in Alexander Newberry’s will as spinsters while a fourth woman in the will received no such description?³⁴ The answer is that the first three women must have been professional spinsters.

The Rowan County legal records identified only a few women as professional spinsters, and yet tradition holds that the skill of housewifery included primarily sewing and spinning. A comparison of apprenticeships to learn housewifery and apprenticeships to learn spinning helped to determine whether spinning really was a common skill of the housewife. In eighteenth-century North Carolina the county court placed orphans who had little or no estate to supervise, along with poor children and illegitimate offspring, in the custody of an established local citizen to learn a trade. With the exception of mulatto children (who served until age 31), males served as apprentices until age 21, while females remained apprenticed until they reached age 18 or married. Indentures usually called for the education (literacy and vocational) and maintenance (food, shelter, and clothing) of apprentices.³⁵

Between 1753 and 1795 approximately 279 children were apprenticed out in Rowan County proper; one quarter (75) of those children were female.³⁶ According to the existing scholarship on Rowan County apprentices, only 1 female was apprenticed to learn a trade: in November, 1785, John Willson, Jr., took Catherine Steagle, aged 11, as an apprentice to learn spinning.³⁷ Most indentures for young girls specified only a length of time and stated that the master should “comply with the law.” When the apprenticeship was completed the girl usually received money and/or property of a pre-agreed amount and a suit of clothes.

In Rowan County, Catherine Steagle may have been the only girl specifically apprenticed to learn spinning, but the indentures for 23 other female apprentices stipulated that they receive a spinning wheel when finished. Out of the 75 young women who were apprenticed, in addition to Catherine Steagle, 23 would learn how to spin during their apprenticeships and could continue spinning when their indentures expired. The other 51 female apprentices may or may not have learned how to spin during their terms, but they were not immediately prepared to spin afterward. In the extant records of the counties formed from Rowan, 49 apprentice indentures specified that young girls learn the art of the spinster (while others learned only housewifery).³⁸ Because not all female apprentices in Rowan County received spinning wheels upon completion of their indentures, and because other counties clearly distinguished between apprenticeships to learn spinning and apprenticeships to learn housewifery, knowledge of and skill at spinning probably were not part of the housewifery apprenticeship and hence not among the common housewife’s chores.³⁹

A survey of the spinning equipment mentioned in Rowan County wills further substantiates these findings. Of the wills written in Rowan County prior to 1790, only approximately 35 percent contain specific references to spinning equipment.⁴⁰ Male decedents wrote the majority of wills that mentioned spinning equipment and they commonly left spinning wheels to their wives or their daughters. In a few wills female decedents left spinning equipment to daughters, daughters-in-law, or granddaughters. The only record of spinning equipment being left to a man occurred when John Owen willed Philip Dowell a “Wolen Wheel and [a] Linnen Wheel.”⁴¹

Although men technically owned the spinning wheels and equipment, the wheels really belonged to, and were used by, women. For instance, James McLaughlin’s will indicates women’s informal ownership of spinning wheels by the fact that he left his daughter Mary “her spinning wheel and Check reel and also [a] brass hatchel” and his other daughter Eleanor “her spinning wheel and a coars hatchel.”⁴² The fact that men legally had to will their wives’ and daughters’ property back to them shows the lack of economic status of women in eighteenth-century North Carolina. Spinning equipment was also among the property consistently willed to a woman regardless of her future marital status, an indication of its importance to the economic well-being of a woman. John Oliphant gave his wife the use of the front room of his house, a slave, a good horse, a saddle, a bridle, her bed and furniture, her apparel, and her spinning wheel during her widowhood; but she would receive only her horse, saddle and bridle, her bed, her clothes, and her spinning wheel if she remarried.⁴³

Determining that professional female spinsters worked in the backcountry has double significance. It reveals that not all backcountry women knew how to spin, and it exposes inherent sexism within the production of cloth in Rowan County. Philip Dowell and his two spinning wheels notwithstanding, only women have been identified as spinsters in the legal records of Rowan County.

Spinning was not considered a male activity in the North Carolina backcountry. Even the Moravian Brethren, who were usually anxious to accomplish any task to please God, would not spin. Before women arrived in Wachovia, the Brothers traded the flax and wool they raised for clothing and yardage. After the Sisters came to Wachovia, the Brethren learned how to break and hackle flax and hemp so the Sisters could spin it.⁴⁴ But when Joseph Spangenberg wrote the Brethren and asked, “How would it be, if you, like many of our Brethren in Nazareth and Bethlehem, too, were to help spin in the evenings or when at other times the weather is bad so that they cannot do anything outdoors,” they refused.⁴⁵ Having survived in the backwoods of North Carolina for three years without spinning, the Brethren apparently did not feel the need to participate in “women’s work,” especially once the Sisters had come to Wachovia.

Earlier statistics on the crafts present in Rowan and its subsequent counties show that weaving was the single most widely practiced trade in the backcountry. Eighteenth-century sources estimate that it took seven spinsters to provide one weaver with adequate supplies of spun fiber. If the women identified as spinsters in legal documents did not actually spin for their livelihood, then who supplied the local weavers? In all likelihood, those women not only spun professionally, but they also had a monopoly on the craft of spinning and thus have become the missing link in the production of cloth in Rowan County. Although most women artisans were legally subsumed by their husbands’ identities, which makes tracing them through the records extremely difficult, new questions must be raised concerning women’s position in the market economy of Rowan County.

Not all backcountry women artisans were spinners, but among those who were a few expanded their domestic skills into professions. While Ann Crosby made dresses for Elizabeth Steele, Mary King used her knowledge of sewing and fashion to create Steele’s hats. King also charged more for a single hat than Crosby charged to make an entire dress.⁴⁶ Surry County wills record that Ann Baker and Ann Mary Deetz were apprenticed to Thomas Whitticor and Michael Teague respectively to learn the art of mantua making, that is, making ladies’ dresses.⁴⁷ In Salem, a young woman named Mary Elisabeth Krause took additional training with the tanner and shoemaker Gottlieb Fritz and learned how to make gloves.⁴⁸

The second largest craft in which backcountry women artisans participated was weaving. Women were the occasional recipients of weaving equipment such as looms, gears, reeds, and tackling from male decedents through Rowan County wills. Weaving gear did not appear as frequently as spinning wheels, nor was it usually named in conjunction with spinning equipment. Mary Myers wrote the most unusual will with references to weaving equipment in 1784, when she left her spinning wheels and weaver’s reeds to her daughters and granddaughters. Myers’s specific mention of a “counterpain,” a “Read [sic] Spotted Coverlid [sic],” “My Black Spotted Coverlid [sic],” and “some Cotten yarn” strongly suggests that those objects were the fruits of her labor.⁴⁹

Four women weavers (one of whom was also a tailor) show up in the extensive records of the Moravians between 1753 and 1790. Mary Elrod, Mary Flood, Elizabeth Hauser, and the previously mentioned Mary Elisabeth Krause all plied their trades (originally) for the Single Sisters’ Oeconomy.⁵⁰ The Single Sisters lived together as a family in their own house, and they supported themselves through a variety of businesses. The Single Sisters’ income came primarily from doing laundry and sewing; however, they were always eager to branch out into new endeavors.⁵¹ Toward this end they established a weaving operation in the 1770s by accepting Elizabeth Hauser, a local teenager who knew how to weave, into the Single Sisters after an attempt to get a weaver from Pennsylvania failed.⁵² Mary Elrod and Mary Flood kept the operation going the following decade.⁵³

If persons were competent in their trades, the Moravians usually had no objection to their going into business for themselves. In 1786 Sarah Buttner chose to move to Salem and work as a weaver. Her husband had died five years earlier.⁵⁴ Buttner’s talents were not limited to weaving, however, and her business skills got her in trouble with a church board, which reprimanded her in 1797 for asking for help with her burgeoning tailor shop. The elders had granted Buttner permission to run the shop so that she could provide for herself. When Buttner’s shop became so successful that she could afford employees to help her keep up with the work, the board turned down her request to hire helpers because Buttner was only to make enough money “for her own livelihood.”⁵⁵

Two other women weavers stand out among backcountry artisans. In 1781, Joseph Hughes of Salisbury bound out a “certain Mulattoe Girl named Ester, a slave” to Joseph Hickman “for... Two years and five months ... to Learn the art and Mistery of a weaver.” Four years later Hickman’s son, Joseph, Jr., appeared before Justices of the Peace Michael Brown and Valentine Beard and swore to the completion of Esther’s apprenticeship and her knowledge of weaving.⁵⁶ A survey of orphan’s court and apprenticeship indentures indicates that Esther may have been the only mulatto in Rowan County apprenticed to learn a trade and the only slave artisan to appear in the records for that period.⁵⁷

Although not a slave, Anna Baker found herself in an equally interesting situation following the death of her husband Michael in 1776. Instead of taking the path of instant remarriage (for which many widows with underage children opted), Baker chose to create her own financial security by expanding her spinning and weaving operation with at least one apprentice, Nansey Jolley. In 1782, with one son grown and gone from home, Baker was doing well enough to be one of a handful of women on the Surry County tax list; and when the census taker surveyed in 1790, Anna Baker headed a household that included 2 males over age 16, 6 males under 16, and 2 other females.⁵⁸

Not all women artisans were models of industry and propriety. Rowan County criminal action papers reveal spinsters accused of engaging in adulterous relationships, stealing goods, making slanderous statements, and bearing illegitimate children. At least three women artisans—Sarah Barrs, Sarah Pincer, and Sarah Stamon—were summoned to court for “criminally copulating, cohabitating, and living together in the constant habitual practice of fornication.”⁵⁹ Two other spinsters, Ann Lock and Agnes Osborough, were accused of stealing six pewter spoons and a peck of meal, respectively. Lock was later brought to trial on unknown charges in the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions but found not guilty.⁶⁰

While these women seem to have had occasional unfortunate brushes with the law, Isabella Moore made that a habit. A spinster, Moore had a distinct advantage over most women in Rowan County: she was a property owner. A deed for purchasing lot 4 in the southeast square of Salisbury from Andrew Bailie in 1763 marked her first of ten appearances in the Rowan County legal records.⁶¹ However, the majority of times that Moore showed up in the records the circumstances were far more serious than closing a land deal. An anonymous Rowan County lawyer recorded in his account book that in March, 1765, Robert Johnston, a Salisbury hatter, sued Moore in superior court for slander. Whatever she said must have been offensive because Johnston paid his lawyer £5 to try the case.⁶² The slander case may have concerned Moore’s allegation that Johnston was the father of her six-month-old illegitimate child, for in July the Rowan County court took away the baby, whom Moore then swore to be the son of James Craige, and put him under the guardianship of John Johnson.⁶³

Moore’s penchant for trouble continued into 1768. In March she was charged with stealing a shift and a handkerchief from Eleanor Morris, and at the trial in April she was found guilty and sentenced “to receive 30 lashes on her bare back at the public whipping post at 3 o’clock this afternoon.”⁶⁴

In her book Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, Julia Cherry Spruill wrote: “Superior women in frontier settlements were strong, daring, and self-reliant, as well as skillful and industrious.”⁶⁵ Esther, Anna Baker, and Isabella Moore are examples of that statement’s truth. However, Esther, Baker, and Moore were more than superior women on the frontier; they were artisans who spun, wove, and sewed in addition to their normal household chores. Because of the exploitation of married women’s economic lives by their husbands, the actual number of Rowan County women who produced thread, cloth, and clothing or who contributed their needlework skills to their husbands’ crafts will never be known. The identification of a few female artisans through occasional legal documents and evidence that not all women practiced those skills as part of housewifery show that the traditional interpretation of women’s work in the southern backcountry fostered by Julia Cherry Spruill and others needs to be reevaluated. Furthermore, such investigation into the presence of women artisans in Rowan County provides a more complete and detailed view of the crafts practiced in the backcountry than historians have offered in the past.

Appendix A

Artisans in Rowan County in 1759

Appendix B

Artisans in Rowan County Region, 1753-1790

Appendix C

Women Artisans in the Rowan County Region, 1753-1790

Footnotes