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The Art of Mort Künstler / The American Spirit / A New Nation
Here you will find a pictorial chronicle of the drama and excitement of American History. These paintings give the viewer an insight into the tumultuous life of this young nation that mere words cannot achieve.
Alamance Plaids, First Commercially Dyed Cotton, 1848 |
In 1789 the twenty-one-year-old Samuel Slater, who had worked for some years in English textile mills, embarked for America, carrying with him knowledge of Arkwright's cotton manufacturing machinery. In America he joined with the Providence, Rhode Island tycoon Moses Brown. Together they built, wholly from Slater's memory, an Arkwright spinning machine. It was the beginning of the cotton textile industry in America and determined the concentration of that industry in New England. The South, which produced the cotton, lagged far behind in manufacturing it into textiles.
The beginnings of the cotton industry in the South may be dated from the establishment of a mill at Alamance, North Carolina, by the Philadelphia-trained Edwin Holt in 1837. It was Holt, too, who learned from an itinerant French craftsman (for the price of $100) the art of dyeing woolen and cotton yarn, equipped the first dye house, and launched the celebrated Alamance Plaids. Mort Kunstler's painting portrays him showing off his newly dyed cottons to a group of admiring ladies. As Holt later wrote with justifiable pride, "...up to that time there had never been a yard of plaids or colored cotton goods woven on a loom south of the Potomac." By the close of the century, the Holt mills had almost a thousand looms producing colored cotton goods.
The American Cynamid Company commissioned this painting in 1973, and donated it to the Alamance County Historical Museum in 1983.
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