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Record Group Number 31Troy Blanket Mills: Letter Books, 1865-1870Compiled by John Harris March 1984 Three letter books of the Troy Blanket Mills Co. were given to the Society by F. Fuller Ripley in 1983. These books contained incoming letters from December 1865 to April, 1870. Troy Blanket Mills (now Troy Mills, Inc.) goes back to 1808, when a carding mill was added to an existing grist and sawmill. After several changes of hands, the mill became the property of Thomas Goodall, to whom some of the earliest letters in this collection are addressed. In November of 1865, Goodall sold out to a partnership consisting of J. H. Elliot, R. H. Porter, and Barrett Ripley. (Barrett Ripley was F. Fuller Ripley's great-grandfather.) Elliot and Porter were President and Cashier, respectively, of the Cheshire National Bank. Ripley, who had theretofore been in the hard ware business in Keene, moved to Troy and became Superintendant of the mill. (See articles by P. B. Breen in "The Mill Wheel", Vol 1, No. 6; Vol. 2, Nos. 1 and 2, 1971, in Record Group 20.) Most of the letters are addressed to B. Ripley as Superintendant, but a number are his personal correspondence, relating to his family, political, and civic activities and so forth. During the period covered by this correspondence, the mill's principal business appears to have been the weaving of shoddy (in the tech nical sense: woolen cloth reconstituted from rags) and its manufacture into horse blankets. In 1869 and 1870, a new mill was under construction. When received by the Society, the three letter books were in poor shape: one had lost both covers and the others one each. This explains the wear and tear along the edges and tops of many of the letters, especially the larger sheets, which stuck out beyond their neighbors and were thus susceptible to damage. Nevertheless, only three letters were so damaged as to be not worth saving, and, so far as we could tell, none had been lost. To show what the letter books looked like, and how they worked, there is in Folder Number 56 one of the covers, which has a descriptive label. The books, as the picture shows, began empty except for gummed brown paper strips to which the letters were to be affixed. In dismantling the books, we removed as much of this brown paper as possible. Where the brown paper obscured part of the text, we soaked it off. Soaking caused no damage to paper or ink on any of these documents. At Troy Mills, letters were pasted two to a page, starting at the back of the book and working forward. The pasting-in seems to have been done at intervals, no effort being made to preserve chronological order, with much overlapping of dates from month to month and book to book. Some letters were as much as a year out of sequence. There was an index (see Folder Number 55) for each book. For indexing purposes, each pair of letters was considered a page, the page number being marked on only one. Thus, page 1 was the first pair of letters pasted in at the back of the book, page 2 the next pair from the back, and so forth until the book was full. Since the letters have now been filed in chronological order, the indices will be of limited use to researchers. Where a letter bears no date, a probable month and year have been entered in pencil. Because of the system (see above), there can be no certainty about these assigned dates. Such letters are filed at the end of the month to which they appear to belong. A group of trade circulars have been filed separately (Folder Number 54), since they have a pictorial interest of their own, and might be made the subject of an exhibition. A diary of Franklin Ripley for the year 1883 has been added at the end of the record group. It was donated by Fuller Ripley in September of 1987. Box No. 1, Folders 1-17 Box No. 2, Folders 18-32 Box No. 3, Folders 33-44 Box No. 4, Folders 45-57  |
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