Stories of historical interest from Historical Society of Salisbury Township, submitted by Leona Baker, president

Weaving is really just an interlacing of threads. The longitudinal threads running down the fabric are the warp, and the lateral threads running across the width of the fabric are called the weft. A loom weaves these threads together to create fabric. Looms hold the warp threads in place while the weft threads are woven through them. The term jacquard is the way the pattern is woven, not the specific pattern itself.

Because a pattern is woven into the fabric, each yarn can be solution-dyed, giving it more fade resistance than topically-dyed yarns. In contrast, patterns that are stamped or printed on the surface of the fabric are especially prone to fading. Today, jacquard is the weaving method of choice for most who buy fabric, be it cotton, polyester, wool, silk or acrylic. This was not always so.

For centuries, patterned fabrics, called brocades, were so hard to make that they were found in only the wealthiest homes, most often as clothing or tapestries. Symbols of status and wealth, they were woven by hand - a long, tedious and backbreaking work usually done by men who labored long hours to produce a few feet a day. Around the turn of the 19th century, one of these laborers was Joseph-Marie Jacquard.

Trying to develop a less labor-intensive method of producing fabric, Jacquard's dream was to efficiently create fabric with those same artistic designs. After years of adaptive experimentation and redesigning other earlier inventions, he created the Jacquard loom.

Resembling the much later invented player piano, Jacquard's loom featured designed wooden cards - holes punched with the desired woven pattern. When his special foot pedal attached to the loom was depressed, it elevated a long row of a set of warp threads in a predesigned pattern. This meant that the pattern would be woven directly into the fabric. Initially called code weaving, it changed the way patterned fabrics were created forever. This innovative idea would later be adapted and used in computer technology.

The Historical Society of Salisbury Township has a double bed-sized woven coverlet in its collection. It is from the Spring Garden Hotel, presently a private home located on Old Philadelphia Pike in Spring Garden. While the society members do not have an exact date of its origin, they believe it is from the 1850s when the hotel was a fixture in the community.