Flax History

Planting Paint: A history of Canada’s other oil

For my recent publications on flax history including new pieces on oilseed agribusiness in the Great Plains and flax fibre in Upper Canada see Research & Publications.

Farmers feed cities, but as I show in my book Flax Americana, starting in the nineteenth century they painted cities too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint – critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded expanded paint markets. Flax Americana re-examines the changing relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and the land through a narrative of Canada’s first and most important industrial crop.

Industrial crops like oilseeds matter because they are currently the fasted growing form of land use on the planet. This is particularly true in the Global South where biodiversity and other planetary boundaries are at great risk, and flax played a significant role in the early stages of this story. Ecologists argue that everything is connected to everything else. Environmental history tells us that this is true over time as well as across space. Your morning margarine comes to you not just from the Canola fields of the Northern Great Plains and Prairies, but from the choices consumers made in the past.

In the early twentieth century the country’s most important oilseed was flax, but when Canadian linseed oil declined it laid a foundation for one of the largest agri-industries in Canada and the largest oilseed industry in the world – Canola and other edible triglycerides. Thus, the margarine and canola oil we consume everyday exists because  —  through a long and complex process of commodity history — urban middle class consumers decided they would like to paint their houses and Prairie farmers decided to plough a few million acres of grasslands to produce flax seed for that paint. The Canadian oilseed sector was made possible in part by the early flax industry and the urban consumption of colour.

An industrial commodity web

Flax is a useful device for examining people’s relationships with industrial commodities. The plant has come to represent a world in which people made their own consumer goods apart from the inputs of Pulling Flax for Fibre, Ontario, 1919marketplaces. Yeomen farmers, passionate about their independence and ability, planted flax and had their wives and children spin it into linen for use in the home. To the extent that this was true it was only a reality in the Thirteen Colonies and perhaps in New France. By the nineteenth century, flax was seldom used for homespun. When flax fibre was grown in large amounts it was in a few concentrated places and for industrial products that seldom returned to the same farms. Yet the mechanization of flax processing was far from a simple transition from home to factory production and farmers did not lack an intimate knowledge of the objectPulling Flax for Fibre, Ontario, 1910 or the commodity it became at the mill. The finished goods made from local flax were goods for rural consumers. Millers possessed the knowledge that made the flax industry work, but they relied on the experience of local and itinerant work gangs for efficient harvesting. Farmers helped process the flax before selling it to the mill whereas others rented their land and labour to flax millers. Government and farm experts promoted the industry, especially during the American Civil War, but had little influence.

Farmers’ connection to the object looked much different in the flax seed commodity web. Here the most important product was linseed oil, an oil used in surface coverings such as paint and linoleum. The major differences were that manufacturers followed flax Dominion Linseed Oil Company, Baden, early 20th centuryproduction instead of directing it, and the farmers were now extensive seed producers rather than intensive fibre growers. Demand for a new commodity, ready mixed paint, created a thirst for flax seed from the newly ploughed grasslands of the West. Linseed oil corporations grew in scale and scope along with most other business structures of the late nineteenth century. Farmers had nothing to do with the crop after selling it to grain merchants and may not have know much about its final destination, but this had been the case since the first industrial linseed oil production and long before the rise of corporate capitalism. If we examine what ordinary producers knew about flax seed production we see two different areas of knowledge, one that required a quick response to market prices and another tied closely to land use patterns and environmental adaptation.Flax (standing) at Joe Bellas’ homestead shack, Alderson, Alberta, 1911

By studying flax’s commodity web, I have found that there was no simple transition from a period when producers had intimate knowledge of their material to a time when people stood aloof from the commodities they created and consumed. Colonial flax growers relied on many commercial inputs of goods and labour to create linen and cordage. Later, when an industrial system for flax manufacturing appeared in the mid 19th Century, farmers took some of their processed flax home from the mill as payment for their crops. They changed their cultivation patterns to reflect the changing market and growing demand for seed over fibre. The final strands of the fibre industry changed very little in the twentieth century, and flax’s most important new product, linseed oil, shows that the farmer was market responsive from the beginning and a complex agent of environmental change.


Tell Your Flax Stories

10 Replies to “Flax History”

  1. Hi, Josh. I came across your this flax blog while researching linseed oil production. My family research has revealed that one of my direct ancestors was a “mastere oljeslagaren” in Sweden about 1820. Although I haven’t found that word in modern Swedish/English dictionaries, I gather it means “master linseed oil producer.”

    Can you give me any insight?

    Thanks!

    1. Hi Janice — “mastere oljeslagaren” is an interesting term. I wasn’t able to find Swedish definitions either. It’s probably a variation from the Dutch, and I think it’s related to the term North American linseed oil millers used for their trade: linseed or oil crushing.

      In Dutch, “slag” has a variety of meanings and many apply to the physical process of crushing flax seed to make linseed oil. “Slag” can mean: hit, bash, hammerblow, smite, etc. It might also be related to the word for slaughter (Dutch, slachten) (German, schlachten) and a link to Scandinavia is more apparent there: (Norwegian, slaktes). I would say you’re right to think your ancestor was a master oil crusher; it’s interesting for me to hear that the trade title probably came from the old country.

      I noticed on your travel blog that you visited one of these mills in the Netherlands, and you have an interesting diagram of a wind-powered linseed oil mill. Would you mind if I posted that picture on my blog?

      Similar mills were built in the U.S. around 1750, and they used what looks to be the same German/Dutch technology. You also mentioned that the mill was extremely noisy. I have references to “oil miller’s disease” or hearing damage that resulted from being around the noise of stampers. I hope no one in your family suffered from it!

  2. Hi Josh,

    I was doing research on Flax Scutchers in Arthur Ontario when I found your 2006 paper Gangs of Waterloo South. I had actually been trying to trace my ggggrandfather who was an Irish immigrant. He lived in Arthur and was listed as a scutcher in the 1891 census.

    Your paper was enlightening and filled in a bit of background about the trade.

  3. Hello Josh

    I am doing some research on the history and production of flax for a business I and 2 partners are in the process of starting. The products will be 100% linen and I thought it would be great to be able to educate our customers as to the labor and love that goes into this wonderful fabric.

    I also really like the images of the people in the fields harvesting the flax. Would it be possible for us to use these images on our web site?

    thank you

    Mary Ruth

    1. Hi Mary Ruth, it sounds like you have an interesting company. Are you able to get any flax fibre locally? What sort of linen products do you sell the most of? You might want to see if your products qualify for sale on http://www.etsy.com. Good luck!

      The harvest images on this site are from the University of Guelph Archival and Special Collections, so you should contact them for permission to use.
      http://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/resources/archival_&_special_collections/the_collections/digital_collections/agriculture/reubensallows.htm

  4. Thanks for writing this interesting blog, Josh. I’m involved with a community heritage project based at a flaxmill (later the site was used as a maltings) in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. Our website is at http://www.flaxmill-maltings.co.uk – maybe you and your readers might like to stop by there?

    I’m researching social and economic history aspects of the site, which was one of the first steam-powered flax-spinning factories (making thread), built 1796 and operating as a flaxmill until 1886. If any of your readers come across historic references to it I’d love to hear! It’s now known as Ditherington Flaxmill-Maltings but in its early ‘life’ it took its name from the Castle Foregate area of Shewsbury rather than Ditherington, so early references may be to Castle Foregate instead.

    The mill is in fact a complex of buildings incorporating one which was the first anywhere in the world to have a complete iron frame (and is therefore ‘the ancestor of skyscrapers’). It was owned by the Marshall family who were reputed at one time to be the largest firm of flax-spinners in Europe, mainly spinning flax at their Leeds mills.

    We know that raw (rippled, retted, broken, scutched) flax used at the Ditherington flaxmill was imported from the Baltic and what are now Belgium and the Netherlands; and that some spun thread was exported through New York. If anyone comes across any Canadian connection it’d be fabulous mutually to explore this.

    Regards
    Joanna

    1. Hi Joanna,
      Thanks for the information and link to your heritage project website. I’m curious if the millers ever convinced local farmers to grow much flax, or if they ever went into the business of cultivating flax themselves. Do you happen to have the business accounts of the mill from the 1796-1886 period? As for the iron frame, I wonder if that was because of the fire risks associated with flax milling (although there were many mills built of wood too).
      Cheers,
      Josh

  5. Hi, we grow flax for fibre in the UK and process it ourselves using tools we have built ourselves as there is no equipment left in the UK now – we go to boat shows and country fairs to show people how it is produced and also do workshops. http://www.flaxland.co.uk for more information. Best wishes, Ann

  6. Hi Josh,
    I started research a purchase of some bedding and ended up here! Thanks for making this article public and available.

    “They changed their cultivation patterns to reflect the changing market and growing demand for seed over fibre.”
    Does this mean that producing seeds and fibre are mutually exclusive? Or rather is there a means to boost yield one way or the other?

    I’m only asking because I think you might know but is there potential in the future for an emergence of a flax fibre/linen industry in Canada? Especially as the development of better technologies for processing the fibre become available and financially viable?

Leave a Reply to m r hedstrom Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.