Thread began as a length of sinew or gut with one end hardened to act as a
needle to take it through holes made in the skins of animals with a piece of
flint. Thousands if years before Christ, man became a spinner of thread and
a weaver of fabric: linen in Egypt, wool in Mesopotamia, silk in China,
cotton in India. Linen, silk and wool passed into European civilization but
cotton fibers were used only in fabric until the invention of machinery.
Linen and silk thread were used for sewing with needles of copper, bronze,
iron, silver or gold.
Even the crude thread of primitive civilization has always been
used not only to sew, but also to embellish. The use of thread for
decoration has appeared independently in every era and every part of the
globe. It was created by both peasant and high born, to adorn the person,
the home, the church and even to make colorful pictures. Embroidery was
done with linen, silk, wool, gold and silver threads.
At the beginning of the 19th century in Paisley, Scotland, James Coats was a
manufacturer of shawls. James and Patrick Clark were operating a thriving
loam equipment business and one of their staples was silk thread used for
the heddles of the hand-looms on which the famous Paisley shawls were woven.
Napolean’s blockade of the British Isles in 1806 stopped the importation of
silk thread. So many developments in spinning machinery were being made at
this time as part of the Industrial Revolution that the Clark Brothers were
soon able to develop a sturdy cotton thread which replaced the missing silk
thread and proved suitable for sewing as well. The first factory for cotton
sewing thread was opened in Paisley in 1812, and the Coats and Clark
families have been engaged in the thread business ever since.
In the United States, by 1840, covered wagons leaving for the West carried
supplies of thread bearing one or the other of these names. In a mill,
opened in 1860 in this country, George Clark first made 6-cord thread for
the newly-invented sewing machine and called it “O.N.T.”—“Our New Thread”.
The cabinets of J. & P. Coats or Clark’s “O.N.T.” threads were as
indispensable to the general store as the cracker barrel.
Coats & Clark now have seven mills in Georgia and Rhode Island. John B
Clark, representing the fifth generation of the thread-making family,
directs the business, which has been developing, manufacturing and selling
the finest threads for domestic and industrial use for 150 years.
