Coldengham was largely self-supporting. The farm grew flax and raised sheep to produce linen and wool that was carded, spun and woven on site. The girls in the family learned to sew as well as knit and with occasional help from itinerant sewers and, I imagine, the family slaves, produced all of the everyday clothing. The ability of the farm to be self-supporting was probably also due in large part to the use of slave labor, mentioned in a letter of Alice Colden (Jane’s mother) from 1732 as “four Negro men and two wenches.”
Some fabrics were imported from abroad including Holland cloth, a fine linen sometimes striped with a colored cotton warp and named for the country where it was first manufactured. Holland was used for women’s dresses and men’s shirts and letters show that Jane’s father was sent 24 yards of Holland for that purpose by his aunt Elizabeth Hill. It has also been recorded that Governor Stuyvesant was christened in an “infant shirt, of fine Holland, edged with narrow lace.” In the Boston Records for the year 1760 “18 shifts one dozn of them very fine hollan” were listed as lost in the Boston fire attesting to the value placed on the imported fabric.
Cherryderry is a striped or checked woven cloth of silk and cotton and has various names including “charadary” and “carridary” which more closely reflect it’s origins in India than the further anglicized “cherryderry.” It was imported beginning in the late 17th c. and was used for women’s dresses and handkerchiefs. It was later manufactured in England but there are no references to it being worn at ceremonial events or mentioned much at all although it is part of a 1740 price list. There it sells for .31 per yard and is the least expensive of all the fabrics including coarse muslin. The only historical reference I find is of a runaway slave caught in Boston in 1728 while wearing a “narrow striped Cherrederry gown.”
