  Prominent in the list of known Williamsburg leatherworkers are the names of William Pearson, tanner and currier, Alexander Craig, saddler and harnessmaker, and George Wilson, boot and shoemaker. As usual in colonial Virginia, each of these men—while primarily occupied in his own special phase of the leather trade—did more or less work in other phases. Corroyeur The shop of a currier and the tools used by his workers. Against the wall at the left a man is scraping a skin with the “moon knife” (figs. 7 and 7 no. 2), holding the skin taut by means of pincers and a thong (fig. 6) around his seat. In the background workers are treading, slicking, and graining skins. In the foreground one man uses the “head knife” to work over the skin on the beam, while another softens a skin with the currier’s mace. Diderot. William Pearson first appears in surviving records as the godfather of Alexander Craig’s daughter Lucretia. At about the same time he was Craig’s tenant in a house adjoining the latter’s tanyard, and shortly thereafter he purchased from Craig the land occupied by the tanyard. The two men seem to have been in partnership for a while, but Pearson—under circumstances now unknown—eventually became full owner of the tanyard. This establishment lay just to the east of the town, its location recalled to this day in the name of Tanyard Street. It had been founded in the early 1750s by Craig in partnership with Christopher Ford, carpenter, and Nicholas Sim, tanner. Craig bought out his partners in 1758, and two years later Pearson came on the scene. At that time the tannery consisted of “Tan Vatts ... New and Old Bark Houses, Mill House and Fleshing House ... and all other Houses and Buildings ... used in the Business of Tanning and making Leather.” When Pearson died in 1777, his estate included “four Negro men Tanners and Curriers, two shoemakers” and three other slaves, indicating that the late master tanner operated a considerable business. The tanyard continued in the possession of Pearson’s widow and descendants for nearly sixty years, being operated at least part of the time by William Plume, tanner and currier from Norfolk. It is hardly a secret that the processes of tanning and currying infuse the surrounding air with a symphony of odors—a circumstance that helps to explain why a tannery was generally located on the far edge of a town, and usually on the downwind side. As if hides and skins were themselves not fragrant enough, eighteenth-century tanners, curriers, and leather dressers made use at various stages or for special purposes of such delectable commodities as fish oil, sour beer, urine, barley mash, and the fermented dung of chickens, pigeons, and dogs. Sketchily described, the procedures employed by the tanner and currier (separate crafts in England but often combined under one roof or in the same man in colonial America) were as follows: 1) Preparing the pelt included the removal of accumulated dirt and stable trash, removal of the hair and epidermis from the outer or grain side (except for furs), removal of shreds of flesh and adipose tissue from the inner side, and plumping up of the fibers of the remaining middle layer, or corium, to be more receptive to the tanning solution. The tanner accomplished all this by repeated washings, followed by a sequence of soaking in solutions of lime, and then by draining, and scraping. The scraping process, known as unhairing and fleshing, he did laboriously with a blunted knife, the pelt being stretched over a wooden horse or beam. He might repeat the liming, draining, and scraping if necessary, and he followed it up with more rinsing and scraping to remove most or all of the lime. 2) Tanning proper involved soaking the hide or skin in a series of tanning vats, each containing a stronger solution—called “ooze”—than the one before. Careful and complete tanning, a slow process, required from several weeks for a light skin to eighteen months for a heavy hide. During this period the hides or skins were many times “hauled and set,” that is, removed from the vat and piled beside it to drain for a time. The same sort of processing took place in tawing, except that alum rather than oak bark supplied the tanning agent. 3) Finishing included trimming, currying, and coloring (if called for) in whatever combination of processes was needed for the intended use of the finished leather. Readers with uneasy stomachs should be satisfied if some of these processes are here left undescribed, only named, to wit: trampling, scouring, blooming, slicking, stricking, shaving, stuffing, dubbing, boarding, graining, bruising, staking, waxing, blacking, sizing. Altogether, William Pearson might have subjected a hide to as many as two hundred separate steps (repetitions included in the count) in its passage from the animal’s back until delivery as finished leather to a shoemaker, saddler, bookbinder, or other leather using craftsman. The total time |
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