Loom, one of many

Row of carding engines

Napping gig

Ring frame ply-twisters

When it was operating full time, Watkins Mill employed 40 workers -- 25 men, 10 women and five children. Most of the men were highly proficient workers called operatives. The women were weavers and the children were often apprentices who were learning the mill industry. The Mill's original work force included immigrant English, Irish, French, Canadian, German and Swedish employees, as well as individuals from the eastern United States. Because of the skill involved, mill workers were often well-paid.

The process was quite detailed. After a sheep was sheared, the wool was matted together to resemble a thin rug, then rolled into bundles. About two-thirds of the material was then sorted by grade and scoured by a willower, a machine that pulls the wool apart and removes dirt and natural oils. It could then be made into yarn or cloth, or dyed. From there, the scoured, unscoured and dyed wool went to the picker room, where the sorts were divided and placed into uniform layers, then fed into the picker, which prepared the wool for carding by pulling it apart into small, fluffy bits.

Carding machines untangled individual fibers and reduced sheets of wool to a continuous strand. The material was then ready to be spun into yarn. After this, it could be sold or continue within the manufacturing process to be woven into cloth, often with complex patterns.

Powering the Mill's looms and machines was a 60-horsepower slide-valve steam engine that Waltus Watkins purchased from a company in St. Louis, Mo. The engine had been salvaged from a river steamboat and its wood-fired boiler provided the 100 pounds of pressure needed to operate the Mill's equipment at the correct speed.

Although the milling process and its associated equipment and employees were expensive to coordinate, the business was profitable. Because of transport costs during the 1850s and '60s, goods produced on the East Coast were not always readily available throughout America. As a result, by 1870 there were about 880 woolen mills located in the Midwest alone.