Ezra Stiles Archives - New England Historical Society

Two hundred years ago, dreams of riches from silk thread sparked mulberry mania throughout Connecticut. Tens of thousands of mulberry trees were planted during the 1830s as prices for the saplings soared to outlandish heights.

By 1840, Connecticut was producing three times as much silk as any other state.

Doctors, lawyers, merchants, even Daniel Webster got caught up in mulberry mania as it spread beyond Connecticut.

In 1830, the U.S. Agriculture Department received a report that “suddenly and by a simultaneous and spontaneous impulse the people of the United States have directed their attention to this source of national riches…Everywhere, from north to south, mulberry trees have been planted and silkworms raised.”

Though the fever for mulberry trees finally broke in 1839, silk manufacturing took hold for many years in parts of Connecticut and western Massachusetts.

Silkworm on a mulberry tree

History of Mulberry Mania

Mulberry mania began with the desire to develop a sustainable industry independent of Europe. Silk seemed ideal for Connecticut. The luxurious fabric commanded high prices. And the silkworms that produced it fed on mulberry trees, which thrived in the state.

In 1734, the Connecticut General Court passed a law awarding three pence for every pound of silk produced.

Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, became obsessed with promoting the silk industry. He started raising silkworms in 1758, giving them names such as Oliver Cromwell and General Wolfe.

Stiles collected mulberry seeds and sent half an ounce to every parish in Connecticut. He asked the ministers to plant the seeds and distribute the mulberry saplings to families in the parish. Six years later, silkworm eggs and directions for raising them were sent to the tree growers.

Ezra Stiles

At around the same time, a horticulturist named Nathaniel Aspinwall began planting mulberry trees in New Haven and Mansfield, Conn. He also sold silkworm eggs to his customers.

Silk production became a cottage industry in Mansfield. Women and children raised the worms — kept in attics or bedrooms — reeled the cocoons and spun the silk into skeins. A silk mill, now at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, was built to spin and twist silk.

By 1789, Mansfield produced 200 pounds of silk a year worth $5 a pound. Peddlers sold silk thread beyond the Mansfield area, while spreading the gospel of riches the stuff would create.

Manias

In 1832, Connecticut’s state government stepped in to encourage the silk industry, paying farmers $500 for every 100 trees tended for three years.

Also in the 1830s, a new species of mulberry arrived that grew faster than other species of the tree.

Prices skyrocketed from $4 for 100 saplings in 1834 to $30 in 1836. It was an era of agricultural crazes: merino mania for a Spanish sheep that produced fine wool; Berkshire mania for a hog that produced high-quality bacon; and the Rohan potato, which could produce 50 pounds of tubers from a single potato.

One Hartford nursery sold 100,000 mulberry trees in one year. At an agricultural fair, people entered 70,000 mulberry trees for prizes.

The financial panic of 1837 continued to fuel mulberry mania, as speculators thought trees were safer bets than stocks or bonds.

By 1839, the craze peaked with prices as high as $500 for 100 trees in some places.

Then prices plummeted. Speculators tore out mulberry trees or burned them. The mulberry blight of 1844 killed many of the survivors.

Young woman working in the Cheney silk mill, by Lewis Wicks Hine. Hine reported “favorable working conditions.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Silk Survivors

At the height of the craze in 1838 the Cheney Brothers – Ward, Frank, Ralph and Rush — built a silk mill in Manchester, Conn. They planted mulberry orchards in the town as well as in New Jersey and Ohio. They survived the crash when their brothers, artists Seth and John, bailed them out with cash.

The Cheneys found silkworms are finicky and silk production is complicated and labor intensive, as silkworm cocoons must be unraveled by hand.

They stopped trying to grow their own silkworms and processed imported raw silk from France instead. Their business grew and by 1870 they had 551 employees. By the end of World War I they owned three mills employing 4,000 people.

Nonotuck Silk Company mills

Samuel Whitmarsh stoked mulberry mania by selling seeds and seedlings from his orchard in Northampton, Mass. When his company collapsed, a utopian community of abolitionists including Sojourner Truth, bought his property. They tried to produce silk as an alternative to cotton. The company failed, but a member restarted the business as the Nonotuck Silk Company in the village of Florence, which imported raw silk. For many years it was Northampton’s largest employer.

Silkworm photo: By Gorkaazk – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10499473. This story last updated in 2022.

In the fall of 1680, John Danforth – with his freshly minted degree from Harvard College – visited Taunton on the South Shore of Massachusetts. He took a side trip to see one of the curiosities of the age: The Dighton Writing Rock. The rock, probably carved by Native Americans, recorded a time when a hostile ship arrived and fought with the local people, he recorded. Thus began the mystery of Dighton Rock.

Draftsman, painter, and watercolorist Seth Eastman appears seated atop Dighton Rock, a proper gentleman in high collar and vest contrasted with the natural setting and primitive, cryptic carvings. Eastman had been commissioned to illustrate Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s book, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. (From the Getty Museum)

Dighton Rock

The mystery of Dighton Rock has no solution. But for centuries it has fascinated scholars, amateur archaeologists, students of New England Native American tribes and tourists.

The rock itself weighs 40 tons and measures about five feet high and 11 feet long. It bears markings and inscription across one of its sides that people interpreted more than 25 times and come up with more than 35 theories as to what they mean.

It rested in the Taunton River in Dighton for more than 300 years, where high tides partially submerged it.

Danforth, later a minister in Dorchester, Mass., helped popularize the rock with his brief description. He forwarded it, along with his drawing of the rock, to the Royal Society of London for its consideration. Danforth’s document remains in the collections of the British Museum today.

Cotton Mather

The prolific Cotton Mather highlighted the rock in a sermon in 1689, which he later published. He gave it the title The wonderful works of God commemorated praises bespoke for the God of heaven in a thanksgiving sermon delivered on December 19, 1689 : containing reflections upon the excellent things done by the great God.

Inscription on Dighton Rock as drawn by John Danforth in 1680

Mather didn’t speculate about the specifics of the writings on the rock . Rather, he mentioned them as writings from a previous era carved on the large rock – “no man alive knows how or when.” However, among his other theories, Mather postulated that before the Puritans arrived in New England, a group of explorers inspired by Satan had crossed from Europe and settled in America – only to die miserably. Perhaps this was a remnant of that earlier group.

In 1767, Ezra Stiles, then president of Yale, declared the figures on the rock were Phoenician. Stiles theorized that the Phoenicians – mainly known for their seafaring trade in the Mediterranean – had managed a visit to North America and left the writing as a calling card.

That idea gained traction in Europe, as well, where Danforth’s drawing received fresh attention among British and French historians. Others concluded the markings were from Armenians who made their way to America via Siberia. And another camp, which had tried to connect the origins of Native American tribes with Asia, proposed that the characters came from explorers from Japan, China or other parts of Asia.

Dighton Rock by Frank Davis, 1893

Washington Weighs In

Later, in 1789, George Washington opined – while touring New England – that indigenous people left the Dighton markings. They resembled Native American drawings he knew about in Virginia, he concluded. Thus, the founding father cast his lot with Danforth’s original reporting that the American Indians had left the message.

In 1837, the controversy was reignited when Danish writer Charles Christian Rafn published his Antiquities Americanae, which contained more than 40 pages of analysis of the Dighton Rock. Rafn concluded the markings on the rock were Norse, and found in the writing the inscription: “Thorfinn and his 151 companions took possession of this land.”

Almost no one else has been able to see the same thing, despite countless hours of study devoted to searching.

Another College Heard From

In 1912, Edmund Burke Delabarre laid a new claim on the rock, arguing it was evidence of Portuguese discovery of America. The Brown University scholar summered near the rock for many years. He had spent countless hours trying to interpret the writing. He concluded that Portuguese explorer Miguel Corte-Real wrote the inscription. Corte-Real had left Portugal in 1502 on an exploratory voyage and was never heard from again.

Delabarre proposed that he had been heard from, in the inscription on the rock that read: “I, Miguel Cortereal, 1511. In this place, by the will of God, I became a chief of the Indians.”

Dighton Rock in 2015

In 1963, a group of preservationists finally wrested the rock from the riverbed and placed it in its own museum in Berkley, Mass. There it continues to inspire controversy.

Then in 2002, a scholar came up with a claim as controversial as any. He said the inscriptions were Chinese and evidence of the Chinese discovery of America.

This story last updated in 2021.

Images: Dighton Rock in 2015 By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64159607.