‘Be sure to incorporate a little history’: Nostalgia and Stories of Place in Cape Breton Overshot Weaving

Abstract

For generations, weavers in the Scottish Highland diaspora communities in Cape Breton have passed down pattern drafts for ‘overshot’ designs embedded in folklore of migration from the Highlands and Islands. This traditional style of weaving is understood by practitioners to be a direct connection to Scotland and the weaving traditions there. This article looks at overshot textiles woven in Cape Breton, and their use as a form of place attachment for a diaspora community. The embedded history in the designs and their display in public areas of the home invited storytelling, reinforcing notions of respectability, community membership and identity.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to S. Karly Kehoe and the Gorsebrook Research Institute; this project was funded in part by the CRC in Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s University. Thanks also to Kate Watt and the Weavers’ Guild of Boston, for draft translation and patterning, to Vicki Quimby, Dianne Quimby, Riv Begun, Hallie Alexander and John Reid for their insights and comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Karen E. Smith at the Dalhousie Library for source recommendations. The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Title quote is from a letter, Dr W. R. Dunton, Jr to M. E. Black, 3 March 1933. Public Archives of Nova Scotia (PANS), MG1 vol 2881, folder 83.

2 D. Campbell and R. A. MacLean, Beyond the Atlantic Roar: A Study of the Nova Scotia Scots (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), p. 3.

3 L. H. Campey, After the Hector: The Scottish Pioneers of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, 1773–1852, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Dundurn, 2007), pp. 107–08; Duncan Shaw to Alexander Hunter, 25 February 1827 (from Benbecula), in Eric Richards, Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 161–62.

4 See papers in M. Harper and M. E. Vance, eds, Myth, Migration, and the Making of Memory Scotia and Nova Scotia, c.1700–1990 (Halifax: Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies, 1999), for some excellent discussions along these lines.

5 See Isaac Land, ‘The Tolerant Coast’, in Sea Narratives (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 239–40.

6 See F. Mackley, Handweaving in Cape Breton (Sydney, NS: Private Printing, 1967); D. K. Burnham and H. B. Burnham, Keep Me Warm One Night (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in cooperation with the Royal Ontario Museum, 1972); E. MacLeod and D. MacInnes, Celtic Threads: A Journey in Cape Breton Crafts (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2014).

7 E. C. Hall, A Book of Hand-Woven Coverlets (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1912); M. K. Swygert, ed., Heirlooms from Old Looms: A Catalogue of Coverlets Owned by the Colonial Coverlet Guild of America and Its Members (Chicago: Private Printing, 1955); J. E. Ayres, ‘American Coverlets’, Textile History, 1, no. 1 (1968), pp. 92–102.

8 S. Falls and J. R. Smith, Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2020); C. S. Anderson and S. M. Spivak, ‘A Re-examination of American Antebellum Handloom Technology for Weaving Fancy Coverlets and Carpets’, Textile History, 21, no. 2 (1990), pp. 181–201; P. Alvic, ‘Eliza Calvert Hall, A Book of Hand-Woven Coverlets, and Collecting Coverlet Patterns in Early Twentieth Century Appalachia’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings (2018), p. 1068, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/1068 (accessed 1 November 2022).

9 Falls and Smith, Overshot, p. 18.

10 M. Zongor and L. Zongor, Coverlets at the Gilchrist: American Coverlets 1771–1889 (Bedford, PA: Sprocket Press, 2005) p. 10; Mackley, Handweaving, p. 54.

11 A shuttle is a device used in weaving to carry the weft thread—the fibre that is passed back and forth between warp threads to create the textile. It functions as a combination of bobbin and needle, guiding and pulling the weft thread/yarn through the structure provided by the warp.

12 K. Inwood and P. Wagg, ‘The Survival of Handloom Weaving in Rural Canada Circa 1870’, The Journal of Economic History, 53, no. 2 (1993), p. 346.

13 Ibid., p. 352.

14 Tartans and plaids are both textiles designed with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines, in multiple colours. While plaids can have any origin, ‘tartan’ is used to mean a specifically Scottish design of colours and stripes, usually incorporating narrow and wide repeating stripes crossing each other at right angles against a solid background. As of the early nineteenth century, specific tartan designs began to be associated with specific Scottish family names or clans. For discussion of the rise in popularity of tartan in Nova Scotia, see I. McKay, ‘Marketing Race: Angus L. Macdonald, Tartanism, and the Cultural Politics of Whiteness’, in In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, ed. I. McKay and R. Bates (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), pp. 253–316.

15 M. Black, interview with D. MacNutt, Nova Scotia, 1979, p. 22 of transcript, MG1 vol. 2881, folder 96, Nova Scotia Archives.

16 Mackley, Handweaving, p. 6; Black, Handcrafts Diary, entry for 31 July 1943; Daily work diary, MG1 vol. 2144, folder 2, Nova Scotia Archives; Black interview, 1979, p. 22. A ‘tartan sett’ is the specific sequence of coloured threads that is both threaded on the loom as the vertical warp and woven as the horizontal weft, creating the distinctive criss-crossed pattern of the textile. Many setts were designed by wrapping threads around a stick in the correct order, which could then be used as the guide for weaving that specific tartan.

17 Abolition and Proscription of the Highland Dress, 19 George II, Chap. 39, Sec. 17, 1746.

18 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 28.

19 Black interview, 1979, p. 22.

20 Black, Handcrafts Diary, entry for 18 June 1943, annotated in 1977.

21 R. A. Houston and C. W. J. Withers, ‘Population Mobility in Scotland and Europe, 1600–1900: A Comparative Perspective’, Annales De Démographie Historique, 1 (1990), p. 297.

22 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, pp. 33–34; Burnham and Burnham, Keep Me Warm One Night, pp. 25, 183–84.

23 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, p. 63.

24 F. Mackley, Cape Breton Coverlet Patterns: Florence Mackley Collection (Sydney, NS: S.n.], 1952), p. 40. Mary Black, Handcrafts Diary, entry for 22 August 1944.

25 V. Quimby, ‘Weaving in Gaelic Nova Scotia: Tartan or Overshot?’, An Rubha, 17, no. 1 (May 2020), p. 18.

26 F. Mackley to M. E. Black, March 1977, MG1 Volume 2881, folder 95, Nova Scotia Archives.

27 ‘Ms and Os’, a weave structure using both ribbed weave and plain weave together, also colloquially known as ‘buckens and owls’ in some American regions. Unlike overshot, ‘Ms and Os’ uses a single shuttle and weft, and the weft is of the same diameter as the warp. K. Watt and G. McGeary, email message to author, 20 March 2022, 28 March 2022. Also see http://weeverwoman.blogspot.com/2013/07/ms-and-os-sweet-old-thing.html (accessed 15 April 2023) for a fuller explanation and drawdown example.

28 Mackley, Handweaving, p. 59; MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, pp. 25–26.

29 Tradition places a number of Norse settlers in North Uist, who married Gaels and assimilated into the local culture. It is tempting to draw a line there from Scandinavian weaving traditions through the Norse/Gael families in North Uist and from there to the Cape Breton weavers of Hebridean descent. See A. J. Macdonald and D. A. Fergusson, The Hebridean Connection: Eachdruidhean Agus Sgeulachdan Bho Sheanachaidhean Uidhist = Accounts and Stories of the Uist Sennachies (Halifax, NS: D. A. Fergusson, 1984), pp. 331–32, 418–22.

30 See MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, pp. 3–4; Burnham and Burnham, Keep Me Warm One Night, p. 176.

31 Quote from ‘Marion’, born c. 1765, describing the weaving of her childhood to a student c. 1850, Hebridean Connection, pp. 71–72.

32 Burnham and Burnham, Keep Me Warm One Night, p. 10.

33 J. McFaddon, ‘Woven into the Fabric: The History of Harris Tweed’, Scotland Magazine, no. 114 (January/February 2021), pp. 30–35; T. M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 42.

34 Mackley, Cape Breton Coverlet Patterns, pp. 51, 55.

35 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, p. 25.

36 For more evocative draft names, see compilations by F. Mackley, Cape Breton Coverlet Patterns, and D. K. Burnham, The Comfortable Arts, pp. 148–61.

37 Mackley, Handweaving, p. 6.

38 S. J. Hornsby, Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton: A Historical Geography (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1992), p. 228.

39 Ibid., pp. 123, 229.

40 ‘Hilda Macdonald and Glendyer Mills’, Cape Breton Magazine, issue 12 (December 1975), pp. 14–18.

41 ‘Handicrafts’, Sydney Booster, 15 July 1935, p. 7, Beaton Institute Archives. A ‘milling frolic’ is a social event where a community gathers at the house of a weaver and manually ‘waulks’ or finishes a newly finished length of wool by wetting and agitating it until it ‘fulls’, or shrinks and becomes dense. Drinks and food are served, and live music is played to keep the fullers on rhythm. See H. Sparling, ‘Taking the Piss Out: Presentational and Participatory Elements in the History of the Cape Breton Milling Frolic’, in Contemporary Musical Expressions in Canada, ed. A. Hoefnagels, J. Klassen and S. Johnson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), pp. 114–44.

42 C. W. Dunn, Highland Settler: The Classic Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia (Sydney, NS: Breton Books, 1953), p. 120.

43 See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: Random House, 1981), p. 77; I. McKay, ‘Handicrafts and the Logic of “Commercial Antimodernism”: The Nova Scotia Case’, in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, ed. L. L. Jessup (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 117–29; and N. Turner, Canadian Mosaic: Nova Scotia Volume (Truro, NS: Women’s Institutes of Nova Scotia, 1957), p. 62.

44 M. Black, interview with D. Macnutt (long version), MG vol 2881, folder 96, 1979, p. 4.

45 C. N. Seremetakis. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2019), p. 7; A. Jones, Memory and Material Culture: Topics in Contemporary Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 22, 24–25.

46 E. Hallam and J. Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 5, 8.

47 Ibid., p. 9; L. T. Ulrich, ‘The Age of Homespun’, Lecture for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2011. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/videos/age-homespun-family-labor-colonial-economy (accessed 15 April 2023).

48 Jones, Memory and Material Culture, p. 18.

49 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, p. 152.

50 Ibid., pp. 35, 132, 144.

51 Florence Mackley produced a book with instructions for converting many traditional overshot drafts into modern household items; see Mackley, Cape Breton Coverlet Patterns, for example, pp. 1, 4–5, 17, 22–23.

52 Ibid., pp. 83–84, 142. See note on Glendyer Mills in particular: ‘In southwest Cape Breton in the area around Macdonald’s mill at Glendyer, established in 1848, many coverlets turn up with an unusually gay range of colours that originated there’ (p. 142); MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, p. 59.

53 Burnham and Burnham, Keep Me Warm, p. 84.

54 W. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 109.

55 Ibid., pp. 44–45.

56 A. Birnie-Lefcovitch, ‘Mapping Constructions of Respectability: The Gender and Class Dynamics of Alcohol Consumption in Halifax, 1939–1964’ (PhD diss., Dalhousie University, 2006), p. 31.

57 S. Morton, Ideal Surroundings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 33.

58 Ulrich, ‘The Age of Homespun’.

59 W. Radcliffe, Origin of the New System of Manufacture, Commonly Called Power Loom Weaving (London, 1828), p. 10.

60 See L. T. Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Vintage, 1991).

61 L. T. Ulrich, ‘Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 55, no. 1 (1998), p. 6.

62 Data from 1881 Census of Canada (Ottawa: Ontario, Library and Archives Canada).

63 D. K. Burnham, The Comfortable Arts: Traditional Spinning and Weaving in Canada. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1981), p. 110.

64 C. Tilley, ‘Introduction: Identity, Place, Landscape and Heritage’, Journal of Material Culture, 11, no. 1–2 (July 2006), pp. 20–21.

65 Ibid., p. 21.

66 C. Rollero and N. De Piccoli, ‘Place Attachment, Identification and Environment Perception: An Empirical Study’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30, no. 2 (June 2010), pp. 198–205.

67 For discussions of bonding and proximity-seeking, see L. Scannell, ‘The Bases of Bonding: The Psychological Functions of Place Attachment in Comparison to Interpersonal Attachment’ (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 2013).

68 Mackley, Handweaving, pp. 66–67; MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, pp. 34–35.

69 T. MacIsaac, A Better Life: A Portrait of Highland Women in Nova Scotia (Sydney, NS: Cape Breton University Press, 2006), pp. 107–08; also see R. Bittermann, ‘Farm Households and Wage Labour in the Northeastern Maritimes in the Early 19th Century’, Labour, no. 31 (1993), p. 14.

70 C. Rishbeth and M. Powell, ‘Place Attachment and Memory: Landscapes of Belonging as Experienced Post-Migration’, Landscape Research, 38, no. 2 (2013), pp. 168–75.

71 See, for example, P. D. Macintyre, S. C. Baker and H. Sparling, ‘Heritage Passions, Heritage Convictions, and the Rooted L2 Self: Music and Gaelic Language Learning in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia’, The Modern Language Journal, 101, no. 3 (2017), pp. 501–16; and M. Melin, ‘Local, Global, and Diasporic Interaction in the Cape Breton Dance Tradition’, in Routes and Roots: Fiddle and Dance Studies from around the North Atlantic, vol. 4, ed. I. Russell and C. Goertzen (Aberdeen: The Elphinstone Institute, 2012), pp. 132–44.

72 L. Scannell and R. Gifford, ‘Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30, no. 1 (2010), p. 6.

73 See K. D. Stiwich, J. McCunn Lindsay and C. Dayal, ‘Woolly Stories: An Art-Based Narrative Approach to Place Attachment’, Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 5, no. 2 (2019), pp. 245–53.

74 K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 163–65.

75 Impost and Excise office records, Port of Liverpool, PANS RG 31-104.

76 J. Dixon and K. Durrheim, ‘Displacing Place‐Identity: A Discursive Approach to Locating Self and Other’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, no. 1 (2000), p. 36.

77 M. Fried, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities of Place’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20 (2000), pp. 193–205.

78 Scannell and Gifford, ‘Defining Place Attachment’, p. 6.

79 G. Morton, T. Bueltmann and A. Hinson, Ties of Bluid, Kin and Countrie: Scottish Associational Culture in the Diaspora (Guelph: Center for Scottish Studies, University of Guelph, 2009), p. 27.

80 Letter, Dr W. R. Dunton, Jr to M. E. Black, 3 March 1933, PANS, MG1 vol 2881, folder 83. Emphasis added.

81 I. McKay, Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), p. 152.

82 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, pp. 108–09; current student numbers from the Gaelic College suggest this interest has diminished to almost nothing in recent years. Personal communication from D. Quimby, email, 6 March 2020.

83 V. Quimby, ‘Dèante le Làimh | Handmade Weaving in Gaelic Nova Scotia: Tartan or Overshot?’, An Rubha, 17, no. 1 (May 2020), pp. 18–19.

84 Rollero and De Piccoli, ‘An Empirical Study’, section 5.

85 J. Gray, ‘Open Spaces and Dwelling Places: Being at Home on Hill Farms in the Scottish Borders’, in The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, ed. S. M. Low and D. Lawrence-Zúñiga (Oxford, Blackwell, 2003), p. 224.

86 D. Lord-Wood, ‘Rural Women’s History, Rural Women’s Folklore: A Gaelic Perspective’ (MA thesis, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1998), p. 184.

87 C. Dennis, Cape Breton Over (Toronto: Ryerson, 1942), pp. 248, 263. With thanks to Vicki Quimby for directing me to this source.

88 Ibid., pp. 248–49.

89 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, p. 132.

90 Ibid., p. 146.

91 Mackley, Handweaving, pp. 22, 24–25.

92 MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, pp. 143–44.

93 See MacLeod and MacInnes, Celtic Threads, especially pp. 131–63 for summaries of the interviews.

94 Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 173, 190.

95 For example, Clanranald, ‘Notes on Scottish History’, Mosgladh (March 1928), p. 2.

96 See, for example, interviews conducted by Cape Breton’s Magazine in the late twentieth century: ‘Hilda MacDonald and Glendyer Mills’, 1 December 1975; ‘A Milling Frolic on the North Shore’, 1 December 1978; ‘Hattie Carmichael of the Meadow Road’, 1 December 1983; ‘With Lottie Morrison from Gabarus’, 1 August 1985; ‘A Visit with Nan Morrison, Baddeck’, 1 January 1988.

97 K. Alexander, ‘Cape Breton Girl: Performing Cape Breton at Home and Away with Natalie MacMaster’, MUSICultures, 43, no. 1 (2016): pp. 89–111.

98 Scannell, ‘The Bases of Bonding’, p. 27.

99 Tilley, ‘Identity, Place, Landscape’, p. 23.

100 D. Snow, ‘Collective Identity and Expressive Forms’, CSD Working Papers (UC Irvine: Center for the Study of Democracy), p. 2, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zn1t7bj (accessed 15 April 2023).

101 Snow, ‘Collective Identity’, p. 5.

102 Mackley, Handweaving, p. 63.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hilary Doda

Hilary Doda is an Assistant Professor in Costume Studies at Dalhousie University. Her research program focuses on the material culture of dress and textiles in the early modern Atlantic world. She holds an Interdisciplinary PhD from Dalhousie University and in 2021 completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies. Recent publications include an article in Acadiensis on Acadian needlework tools and a book chapter on Mary I’s investiture wardrobe as Queen of England. Her book on the clothing of pre-deportation Acadia is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press.