An American fantasy: myths about rural life are as old as the Greek eclogues and as modern as the L.L. Bean catalog. Nineteenth-century America gave us the Age of Homespun, an ideological haven from the more complicated realities of the country's history

The Age of Homespun wasn't born in Litchfield, Connecticut, but it was christened there on August 14, 1851, the second day of the county centennial. Like much of rural New England, Litchfield County had been in decline for almost a generation, its population siphoned off by new industrial cities farther east and by more fertile states and territories to the west. But under the watchful eye of the Litchfield Village Improvement Society, the town was discovering a new dignity through history.

At 10:00 A.M. on the centennial's first day, a procession led by a military band moved out from Mansion House in the center of town. Behind the band marched Connecticut's governor, the general of the state militia, various local officials, and the male citizens at large. Women stood on the sidelines or hastened to a big tent set up on the common.

A reporter for the New York Observer estimated that as many as 5,000 people gathered in the tent on opening day. The assembled crowd listened to speeches emphasizing Litchfield's progress from a backwater town to a center of education, enterprise, and trade. Most speakers focused on the biographies of men deemed significant to the county's history: its military leaders and judges, its doctors and lawyers--the sorts of men, in fact, who marched in the centennial parade. The speakers acknowledged the "fair daughters of Litchfield County" with a few lyrical asides. Judge Samuel Church praised the hardworking colonial wives "to whom the music of the spinning-wheel and the loom was more necessary than that of the piano and the harpsichord." Poet and wit John Pierpont also gave brief mention to the ladies, assuring them that their housekeeping talents were valued and that they, too, had been beneficiaries of progress. In a particularly enthusiastic passage, he described an exhausted colonial housewife sitting slumped beside her wheel, "a heap of cotton lying by her side," when suddenly the steam from her boiling teakettle rose, took the form of an angel, and spoke:

   Woman, fear not, for thou shalt see the day,
   When I, yes I, the vapor that I seem,
   Of fire and water born, and baptized Steam,
   Will save you all this labor

There was no hint in Pierpont's poem that, even" as he spoke, 40,000 women labored in New England's textile mills. In his view, steam, not workers, produced calico.

At half past ten on the celebration's second day, the procession formed once again, with a new orator, the Reverend Mr. Horace Bushnell of Hartford, at its head. A handsome man with a large head and a shock of dark hair, slightly silvered, he was about to surprise his audience. Taking as his text Proverbs 31--the chapter describing the virtuous woman who "layeth her hands to the spindle"--Bushnell proposed that the first century of Litchfield County's history be called "the Age of Homespun." He used the craft of cloth making--a subject that had been mere miscellany in the judge's discourse and an object of humor and pathos in Pierpont's poem--to challenge conventional ideas about history.

The causes of a nation's greatness, Bushnell argued, had never been recorded and perhaps never could be, certainly never in the deeds of famous men. He told his audience not to go into burying grounds looking for tall monuments to important people. "It is not the starred epitaphs of the Doctors of Divinity, the Generals, the Judges, the Honourables, the Governors, or even of the village notables called Esquires, that mark the springs of our success and the sources of our distinctions. These are rather effects than causes; the spinning-wheels have done a great deal more than these."

In the colonial Litchfield of Bushnell's imagination, there were neither rich nor poor, and few distinctions among neighbors. Within the family, both sexes did essential work. Fathers "climbed among these hills, with their axes, to cut away room for their cabins and for family prayers," and "mothers made coats, every year, like Hannah, for their children's bodies, and lined their memory with catechism." Bushnell celebrated both the anonymity and the dignity of those he considered the true founders of Litchfield County. "Who they are by name we cannot tell--no matter who they are--we should be none the wiser if we could name them, they themselves none the more honourable. Enough that they are the King Lemuels and Queens of Homespun, out of whom we draw our royal lineage." Bushnell's allusions linked Litchfield's pioneers to ancient textile traditions and Old Testament piety: Hannah was the mother of the prophet Samuel; King Lemuel was the assumed author of Proverbs 31.

Bushnell's vision was part myth, part history. Much of what he said was based on his own memories. He had grown up in a cloth-making family. His mother had spun and woven flax and wool; his father had operated a wool-carding mill and a shop for pressing and dyeing homespun cloth. When Bushnell described people wearing coats made from "sheep individually remembered," he was surely talking about his own childhood. His description of young "Queens of the spindle" agreeing to "join works" in cooperative spinning, "enlivening their talk by the rival buzz of their wheels," was based on recollections of gatherings he had himself witnessed. His descriptions can be corroborated in hundreds of historical records. In Bushnell's childhood, cloth making really was a cooperative enterprise, a neighborly as well as a household activity, and women were at the center of production.