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Partly cloudy skies. Low 61F. Winds light and variable..

Partly cloudy skies. Low 61F. Winds light and variable.

Pam Crouch weaves cotton thread using a 19th-century wooden barn loom at the Lloyd Tilghman House & Civil War Museum to demonstrate how clothes would have been created in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Pam Crouch weaves cotton thread using a 19th-century wooden barn loom at the Lloyd Tilghman House & Civil War Museum to demonstrate how clothes would have been created in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Visitors at the Lloyd Tilghman House & Civil War Museum in Paducah now have the chance to see how clothes in the early age of America’s history would have been made thanks to the work of members of the Heartland Lace Guild who spent several days restoring a mid-19th-century loom to a modest working condition.

Pam Crouch, McCracken County resident and president of the Heartland Lace Guild, now uses the restored wooden loom, and dresses in fashion from the Antebellum Era, to show tourists from riverboat cruises and other museum visitors how the counterbalance loom would have been used to weave fiber into cloth items like shirts, pants, dresses and towels.

She also shows visitors the basics of lacemaking and some of the popular lace patterns and styles of the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, demonstrating lacework is what originally brought her to volunteer at the Tilghman Civil War museum earlier this summer.

Sitting in an upstairs bedroom styled to resemble what a 19th century-style bedroom may have looked like, Crouch spent several days showing groups the art of lacemaking. All the while, pieces of a mid-1800s wooden loom, which museum director Bill Baxter said was donated to the museum by a nearby household to prevent the artifact from being used as firewood, sat unused, collecting dust in the corner opposite of Crouch’s workspace.

“Bill allowed me to set up a display and make lace, and about six days of looking at that loom was all I could handle. For a loom where everything’s supposed to be there, I just thought it would be really neat if it worked,” Crouch said.

Crouch, a lacemaker since 2006, had little experience in the art of weaving, let alone how to figure out which pieces of the wooden “barn loom,” one originally designed for families to make their own clothes, went where. Even her weaver friends, who primarily worked on table looms, were not exactly sure what to make of the museum’s loom that stretch several feet long and nearly touched the ceiling of the Tilghman House bedroom it was displayed in.

There are slight modifications Crouch employs to have the loom operating as close to the period-era style as possible while still being able to create cloth items. Ideally, all of the wooden beams cloth fibers touch on the loom should be smooth, Crouch said. However, because of the age of the wood on the loom, Crouch uses pieces of fabric to cover parts of the beams the woven threads would touch to ensure the threads do not snag on the wood.

Additionally, because the reed, which is used to separate and space the threads from the back frame, was not in usable condition, Crouch grouped together popsicle sticks and other pieces of wood to fashion together a new loom while keeping to the loom’s wooden style. Save for a single nail on the top beam, the loom is free of metal, and Crouch said she did not want to use a stainless steel reed that would not have been used with this loom.

Embracing a sense of modern ingenuity to fix an artifact of the past, Crouch said YouTube and Google became her friends as she searched videos for how the counterbalance loom was supposed to work and searched for historic images to reference how the loom would have looked during the 19th century.

Crouch recruited other members of the Heartland Lace Guild, a group of lacemakers and lace enthusiasts spanning from the Purchase Area to southern Illinois and Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to help thread and untangle all of the cotton thread she had bought to use to create hand towels for display inside of the museum.

After several days of tedious work, the loom was ready to be used for its original purpose it was made for nearly 200 years ago.

“The idea, for me, is to show them something they haven’t seen before. Show them in a way that is interesting and grabs their attention,” Crouch said.

Crouch is currently using the loom to create a hand towel to display inside of one of the Tilghman House’s upstairs bedrooms. When she demonstrates the loom and her lacemaking work to tour groups, she also shares the historical significance of the fashion creations.

While a wooden barn loom would have been used most between the late 17th century and the mid-19th century, Crouch said the barn loom would have come in handy for families living in Confederate states during the Civil War when Union troops blocked railways and interrupted shipping to Confederate ports, preventing the transportation of many factory-made clothing items and goods from the north.

For Crouch, she enjoys getting to share the significance of weaving and lacemaking to the livelihoods of America’s forefathers while also sharing the work and passion that is needed to create these pieces of art and handiwork.

Crouch will be back at the Tilghman House & Civil War Museum today and Saturday to show riverboat tourists and other visitors the art of lacemaking and weaving.

Follow Hannah Saad on Twitter, @ByHannahSaad or on Facebook at facebook.com/hannahsaadpaducahsun.

Follow Hannah Saad on Twitter, @ByHannahSaad or on Facebook at facebook.com/hannahsaadpaducahsun.

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