Behind the main building at the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum in Burlington, in a sunny patch of grass, people of all ages gathered around a small plot of straw-colored stalks.
Skye Makaris, lead educator at the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum in Burlington, planted this 200-square-foot plot back in spring. It’s filled with tight rows of flax — a crop that, in the late 1700s, was integral to colonial life.
Flax is the raw material that makes linen, one of the oldest textiles used by humans. Societies from the Egyptians, to medieval Europeans, to colonists in the late 1700s wore linen and used it for household goods like bedding. American-produced linen even became a touchpoint in the Revolution, as women began to make and wear “homespun” fabrics to become less dependent on textiles from Britain.
People sought out linen then for the same reasons they do now.
“It is always pulling moisture away from itself, and it retains this natural moisture-wicking property as a textile as well," Makaris said. "So, to wear a garment made of linen next to your skin on a warm day is to have it constantly pulling and wicking the moisture from your skin.”
The flax harvest is held every year on “Fanny’s Day,” when the museum highlights the work of women on early Vermont homesteads.
Fanny Allen was the wife of legendary Vermonter Ethan Allen. She maintained their home and farm and grew food for the family. Like many other homesteading families in colonial New England at the end of summer, she and her children would harvest their a plot of flax (records show the Allens grew about a quarter-acre), then spend weeks processing it into linen thread.
On the day of the museum’s flax harvest, staff and volunteers wore their best period garments. Makaris, portraying the day’s titular figure in a floral printed caraco, striped apron and straw hat, led museum visitors as they plucked handfuls of the stuff.
“When it's actually ready for harvest, it will come out of the ground almost effortlessly, almost like pulling a loose tooth,” she said.
The resulting pile of fibrous vegetation was then rippled — a term for the act of removing the seedheads with a comb-like device.
After this flax dries, it’ll be retted — either soaked in a tub of water or left out in the morning dew for weeks. An 18th-century word for “rot,” retting allows microbes to break down gummy pectin in the plant, making its tough outer husk easier to remove.
The next steps, breaking and scutching, slowly start to reveal the thin fibers. Then you can move on to hackling, when those fibers are combed until they become smooth, shiny, and a bit hair-like.
The result of all this physical work? “A skein of thread that's maybe the thickness of my thumb, and about a foot long,” Makaris said.
Old-time processes like this might seem like the stuff of days long past, but many small-scale flax producers still use the same methods now.
In the 10 years since the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum started demonstrating it, Makaris said she’s seen a growing interest in linen production. That includes individuals who want to try making linen themselves, with the same tools Fanny would have.
The Ethan Allen Homestead will hold its “Flaxstravaganza” event, where staff will show visitors how this flax is processed, on Saturday, Oct. 17.
