Silk

While having a phone chat with my daughter today, we covered several topics of special interest to each of us, health, books,knitting projects and her plans for a retirement cabin. Then our chat drifted into remembrances of conversations with family members and I mentioned one I had with my paternal grandmother many years ago. Grandmother told me about raising silkworms and feeding them mulberry leaves.¹

I believed her, because she was not the kind of person to exaggerate or make up stories, but at the same time, I wondered if it really had happened. We never discussed it further but I kept the remarks in my mind. My daughter and I talked about the pros and cons of Grandmother actually raising silkworms; I knew mulberry trees grew in the United States, because we had one in the yard of our house in Iowa where I lived as a child.

I have to back track here in order to set the scene of my Grandmother's young life. My father was raised in the south, my mother was raised in the north, consequently, I have ancestors that fought on both sides of the Civil War. Grandmothers father, my Great Grandfather, was raised in Virginia.

There had been an effort to produce silk in the Colony of Virginia with the cultivation of silkworms in response to King James's interest in the subject, but it was unsuccessful, possibly due to lack of enthusiasm among the Colonists. When a young barrister in England, Edward Digges ², emigrated to the Virginia Colony, he developed a strong interest in reviving the production of silk.

Digges purchased from Captain John West 1250 acres in the present day York County, Virginia. Digges even wrote a pamphlet describing how the silkworms could be kept outdoors on native mulberry trees. Digges efforts to create a silk industry proved futile when the Virginia Assembly became disillusioned and passed an act that rescinded a prior act requiring the planting of mulberry trees.

Today there a numerous mulberry trees still standing and the Georgia's Historical Society relates information about the Mulberry Grove Plantation in Georgia.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulberry_tree
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Digges
3. Four of the most important domesticated silk moths.
   Top to bottom: Bombyx mori, Hyalophora cecropia, Antheraea pernyi, Samia Cynthia.
   From Meyers Konversations-Lexikon (1885–1892)

Silk Moths ³