About 1900 the American Printing Company in Fall River, Massachusetts was the world's largest cloth printing company.
"The largest textile operation of its kind"
The Fall River Historical Society tells us: Standard cotton prints manufactured in Fall River were "a plain weave textile with sixty-four threads per inch in both warp and weft; it was an inexpensive commodity...introduced in Fall River by Job Eddy (1778-1853) in 1824 in a small building of the Pocasset Manufacturing Company."
"Our Shirtings are a selected 64x64 print cloth."
Quilting fabric today tends to have a 60 to 70 thread count.
I thought I'd look into the Calico King's life & business. As with most biographical snapshots the picture wasn't always pretty.
Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden (1842 – 1912)
Early 1860's while he was at Yale.
Matthew Borden was born into a wealthy Massachusetts family, quite interrelated and linked to the dry goods business over generations. After an elite education at Phillips Andover & Yale he became a sales rep for the family's Fall River mill American Print Works, which faced financial problems in 1879. Borden and his brother Thomas re-organized it as the American Printing Company.
Six years later Thomas sold his share to Matthew.
M.C.D. Borden of Fall River became "The Calico King."
1897 feature from an Ohio newspaper
Borden seems to have employed an effective publicist who kept his name
in the papers, often with the nickname "The Calico King."
Matthew Borden may have been the King of Calico but he is not the most famous Borden of Fall River.
Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860-1927)
You'll recall his cousin Lizzie who in 1892
"took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks."
There were a lot of Bordens and they had a lot of trouble. Lizzie's uncle Lawdwick Borden's wife Eliza Darling Borden suffered a terrible case of post-partum depression in 1848 and drowned her infant boy. She tried to drown her older daughter who survived. Eliza then slit her own throat.
The New England Quilt Museum owns this 1825-1850 quilt that might
have been stitched by Mary Ann Bessey Borden (1810-1894.) The star
quilt was found in her home after she and her husband had died.
M.C.D. Borden
Matthew C.D. Borden has a reputation as a kind man and a fair employer (perhaps thanks to his publicist.) A glimpse into his personality is seen, however, in his will. In a plot Agatha Christie might have concocted the will read in 1912 surprised the family with a secret codicil disinheriting son Dr. Matthew S. Borden unless he divorced his Jewish wife Mildred Nelson Negbauer Borden (1877-1930.) Apparently, just not their class as her father was a tailor in New Haven.
1912
Dr. Matthew Sterling Borden (1872-1914) and wife
Mildred Nelson Negbauer Borden (1877-1930)
Matthew & Mildred had already divorced once to please his father (and collect some money) then secretly remarried. In September, 1914 after accepting a million dollars for not contesting the will Matthew's life went downhill. Driving recklessly, he was killed, taking his passengers, his chauffeur and 2 friends with him. Just a few weeks earlier he'd killed Flushing policeman John Mee and his horse in another careless driving incident.
Yikes!
The Bordens (apparently related to the Simpsons)....
Read more:
Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River, by Michael Martins and Dennis A. Binette, Fall River Historical Society Press.
Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender. By Joseph A. Conforti. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
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