Helmshore Mills Textile Museum - Museum Exhibits

Museum Exhibits

The museum divides its collections into three themed areas, representing the wool story, the cotton story and the spinning floor.

The wool story

This shows the water wheel and fulling stocks and clay pots used to collect urine from the local cottages, that produced the ammonia needed for fulling. It goes on to show the later box system. There is a tenter frame, with the tenterhooks to show how the cloth was dried without shrinking and how teasles were used to lift up the nap. This was of course later mechanised and there is a teasle holding frame.

The cotton story

This illustrates firstly the hand weavers cottage, with a frame loom with a hand thrown shuttle, mannikins represent the weaver and two women spinning the yarn on different types of wheel. A child is shown hand carding. It is here we see a 16 spindle spinning jenny that would have dated from about 1760, and a 50 spindle improved jenny. There is a replica of Arkwrights first carding machine. There is a complete sequence of machines that would have taken the bolls from the bales, opener, scutcher, breaker card, finisher card, draw frame and finally a waterframe. Sharing the floor at Whitaker's Mill is the equipment needed to prepare the waste cotton for the cards in the room above. There is a single cylinder pisker for soft waste and a six cylinder devil for the hard waste.

The spinning floor

This was one of two at this mill and has all the equipment to breaker card the shoddy (recycled cotton) and to finisher card the slivers into rovings, these go onto the 714 spindle Taylor Lang spinning mules. Opening, scutching and mixing happened on the floor below.