America's first historian, Abiel Holmes, records that by 1792 enterprising New Englanders were enjoying success in the cultivation of silk worms. The idea was to begin an American source for silk and thus avoid importing the luxury from France or other European brokers. Silk had been appreciated in the West since at least the days of Augustus, being brought from China to Syria by way of India. Trade in silk and spices continued (Indian merchants were eager for glass and linen from Alexandria, for example), and even as late as the sixth century there was "a remarkable degree of association between China and the Roman Empire." It is not necessary to review the medieval appetite for spices and silks or the efforts to bypass Oriental middle-men, but it is worth noticing that the gamble on sericulture made by early American entrepreneurs had an ancient pedigree.
Cumberland County's first historian, I. D. Rupp, records efforts at the silk trade. In his notes on the borough of New Cumberland, he says: "In the height of the multicaulis mania, an association for the manufacture of silk was started in this town."4 The mania for growing the morus multicaulis (mulberry) centers around 1840. This paper will focus on that mania and the association of businessmen in New Cumberland who then tried their hand at the manufacture of silk.
The reason Abiel Holmes in his Annals of America remarked upon silk spinning in 1792 was that that year saw "the first clergyman's gown fabricated throughout [entirely] in America." When in 1793 the president of Dickinson College, the Rev. Charles Nisbet, received from an anonymous donor (or, as he believed, a practical joker) "a Purple Silk Coat," Nisbet assumed it must have originated in Europe. Nisbet mused, "I cannot imagine that the Citizen Minister [of France], who probably had stole [sic] some Cloathes out of the Wardrobe of Lewis the 16th would have taken it in his head to make me a Present of any of them." Nisbet grew more amused by the absurd episode, wondering whether "the Pope of Rome has thought proper to promote me to the Purple by making me a Cardinal. .. But if this is the Case, he would have sent the red Hat along with it." The laugh Nisbet got from picturing Pope Pius VI or Edmond Genet sending him, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, a purple silk coat shows that to him silk meant Europe.
In European countries, the silk business was risky. Princes and parliaments officially encouraged the manufacture of silk, all in hopes of avoiding the expensive trade with China. Even in Lyons, France, where the manufacture of silk had been established since the fifteenth century, "the raising of silkworms, from the gathering of mulberry leaves to the stifling of the pupae ... was virtually a cottage industry." The small numbers of people and their flimsy results were common. In the eighteenth century, efforts by Frederick the Great of Prussia to establish a silk industry in Berlin failed, but Mennonites in the Rhineland, relying upon close-knit family businesses, flourished at making and selling silk.
By the first quarter of the nineteenth century the manufacture of silk in America had become lucrative. Again, Abiel Holmes notes some interesting details. "In 1825," he records, "the sewing silk and raw silk, produced in Windham county, Connecticut, was estimated to be worth 54,000 dollars a year." The previous year, according to Holmes, imports of silk goods totaled $7,103,000; exports were $1,816,000. Reversing those numbers steadily gained national attention. By 1830 a French immigrant, Peter Stephen DuPonceau, was lobbying Congress to enact legislation "to introduce ... the proper methods of raising and manufacturing silk." In February 1837, Congressman John Quincy Adams presented the House of Representatives with a report on the cultivation of mulberry trees and the making of silk.
It was not only a federal concern. Throughout the 1830s the General Assembly of Pennsylvania also took an interest in the manufacture of silk. In 1836 and 1838 the Assembly amended its Act of 1832 "to Promote the Culture of Silk." This Act originally provided for the governor to incorporate any association successful at producing silk. When this "company has associated together to cultivate the white mulberry for the production of silk," and when it has "actually set out one thousand or more white mulberry trees," the governor could issue a patent of incorporation. The newly incorporated company would have rights to making silk within its county, and "as the raising of silk occupies but a small part of the year," the company "shall have the privilege of establishing and conducting a manufactory of the raw material. " Moreover, the company "may also conduct a school or academy for the education of youth," but the school must be "so conducted as to combine manual labour [sic] with literary and scientific instruction." Meanwhile, "the whole art and mystery of raising and manufacturing silk shall be taught to such of the students as may desire it." These silk companies were restricted to having capital under $50,000, they could not use that capital for banking, and they could not own more than five hundred acres of land.
On April 6, 1784, in the county courthouse in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Board of Trustees of the fledgling Dickinson College met and asked two of its members, John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush, to devise a seal for the college.