In 1980, Claire Wilson, a refined and soft-spoken Quaker - now in her 90’s and still living in Putney - met at the home of Paul and Dorothea Stockwell in West Brattleboro with a group of twelve or so folks interested in starting a spinnery. It would be a small business that would refine raw sheep’s wool into fine yarn. David Richie, now 80 with 35 years of his life invested in The Spinnery, was in that meeting. He recalls Claire saying “Why do we have sheep up here in the hills of Vermont but we have nothing to show for it?”
Richie said to this writer, “That was the beginning of a small group that, since 1980, created The Spinnery using the Quaker consensus organizational model we have here now.” Libby Mills was at The Putney School and started talking further with Claire. Lisa Merton, also from Putney, had worked at a woolen mill in Sweden. She said to us all: “You can do it.” We did.
Claire and Libby were also at the heart of the matter fighting the Seabrook Power Plant – they went to jail together for a week or more over their stand against nuclear power. (Vermont Yankee was then only an idea in the wind.) In another meeting months later which Claire and David Richie attended, Claire said, “We don’t want to be against something but for something. Let’s start The Spinnery.” Ritchie heard that and said “I’m with you,” and he has been to this day.
Ritchie went on to say, “None of us had any mechanical abilities. We visited one spinnery in Harrisville, NH where we met Ray Philips, the owner – “A can-do guy.” We drove to Canada. We found two machines in Biddeford, Maine that worked together: a spinning frame dating from 1950 and a carding machine dating from 1916 that straightens fibers. We learned we needed a rigger and a plyer and a skeiner and a picking machine which we found outside Boston. I’d manage to load these into Libby’s pickup and drive them to Putney. Then all we had to do was figure out how to align and run these totally outdated machines, find people who knew how to run these machines, and set up a shop and source wool. Then we learned we needed a skeiner machine. Claire and I drove to Rochester, NH and got one into my pickup. We put one foot in front of the other.
“In June 1981, we wrote letters to potential investors/donors. Diane Wahle chipped in heartily. People wrote saying how much they would loan us. We pulled together enough money to buy the recently closed Mobil Gas Station right off Exit 4 off I-91 in Putney where we are today. We made a big sign: Green Mountain Spinnery: Pregnant with Promise.”
So what does David Richie, a guy who was born in 1945 in Chicago and grew up in Indianapolis have to do with all this? What’s his story? David Richie’s father was a trained engineer who had worked 20 years for the Bliss Steel Company but had been moved to Indianapolis just as young David was starting high school – no friends, no car, no support. “I look back and realize that’s where my compassion for the uprooted comes from. I was an underdog.
“After high school I went to Miami University of Ohio as an economics major. I was in over my head. I persisted but I had to be good at calculus and I wasn’t. I graduated anyway in 1967. I enlisted in the Army in a kind of placeholder position for me I was stationed in Germany and set up as a clerk in finance.By 1969 I was out of the Army. I travelled across Europe for six months, then stayed with my brother Bill in San Francisco. It was there that a relative asked, “Did I know Vermont? Did I know about International Career Training at The School for International Training that could lead to working with CARE and other non-profits.
“I ended up going to SIT and then on to a two-year internship in Ghana working in The World Assembly of Youth. Back in Brattleboro, I worked with Charlie McCormick at SIT and married Grace Troisi who was a community activist. I worked in East Harlem for a couple years helping a nun there get the people in her federalized school system to work together. I did that fruitfully for two years but then we moved back to the Brattleboro area.
“We stayed in Lyman Stookey’s garage apartment in Westminster West. I was an aide at Morningside Heights for developmentally disabled adults while my wife and I literally built our house in East Dummerston. That’s when I heard about Claire Wilson and her ideas about stating what would become The Spinnery. I loved the Quaker consensus model of decision making. I could be part of something new and exciting.
“With the Mobil Station at Exit 2 in our hands, we began to remake the old building (though David pointed out to this writer that the floor on which my chair was sitting on for my interview with him used to be part of the concrete garage floor where cars sat to be repaired.)
“ We hired Charlie Haines, from Northbridge, MA to move all the old and dusty used equipment we had purchased into the newly refurbished building. He picked up the plyer and skeiner in Maine. Clair and I got back into Libby Mills’s pickup and headed to Maine again. We bought a picking machine in Maine and trucked it to Putney in someone’s pickup. Jim Taylor who was at The Putney School in Maintenance, did all the carpentry.
“We looked for bank loans, passing around bits of sticky wool to bankers who were not impressed. We talked to The Vermont Industrial and Economic Development Board and the Tuck School of Business at Tufts. (We hired three interns from there to help us set up a business.) Tom Phillips convinced the Economic Development people to give us a $20,000 loan.
Then we had to find people with the technical skills to run all of this outdated equipment that was sort-of working. Claire Wilson was the yarn quality person. She wrote letters to sheep breeders across the country. We opened in December, 1981, “Pregnant with Promise.”
“Ten people work here now, five of us being part-owners. (Employees can buy into the business after two years of working here.) Maureen Clark, who oversees marketing and finances, has been here 25 years; Meghan Curran, who runs the spinner machine, has been here ten years. I’ve been here from the start….
“Each week, several 600 pound bales of organic wool arrive here from farms that raise sheep largely for their wool. Examples of breeds are Romneys, Corriedale, Hampshire Downs, Dorset, Targhee (fine wool from out west), Cheviot and others. Two women start the process by weighing the wool on a scale patented in 1867 and then they hand-clean the wool to remove bits caught up in the sheep’s wool. The wool then gets washed and then spun in an 1897 4’ wide spinner/extractor that came from the basement of what was The Andrews Inn in Bellows Falls. The wool is then dried and passed through a steel-toothed 100 year old “Picker/Opening Machine” that shoots the clean wool into an 18’ high, 5’ wide, 10’ long bin as clean, fluffy wool.
The wool is then fed into a 50’ long carding machine dating from 1916. It’s all belts and whirling wheels that straighten the wool gathered by the machine as “pencil roving” - long straight strands of wool 1/8” in diameter spun onto 6’ spools on a spinning frame from 1950. Twisted yarn comes out the other end in the form of bobbins that are… and so to the finished product: finished organic wool ready to be shipped to others who will dye or knit or…..”
The Spinnery’s purpose is to produce good quality yarn from mostly New England sheep (Including Vermont Shepherd in Westminster West) to be used by handweavers and knitters across the country. And David Ritchie’s job has developed since 1981 to the point where he is central to their entire process.
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.