The “Boosums” That George Mentions
Diary by George Holcomb
by Alex Brooks
The “boosums” the Holcomb women make for concerns in Troy were shirt bosoms, a shirt front made of fancy material to be worn on formal occasions. The shirt companies of Troy employed women in the area on a piecework basis to make them.
The innovation which drove much of this phenomenal growth was the idea of having a detachable collar, said to have been invented in Troy in the late 1820s. Don Rittner, a columnist for the Troy Record, wrote in one of his columns, “Orlando Montague, the first person to wear a detachable collar, soon began his own collar factory with his business partner Austin Granger. The Montague & Granger collar factory began at 222 River Street… Besides collars, they manufactured “dickeys” (detached shirt bosoms) and separate cuffs.”
By the end of the century, writes Rittner, 90% of the collars worn in America were made in Troy, which gave it the name “The Collar City.”
Two term Senator Chauncey Depew, in his 1895 book on the first century of American commerce, wrote that the value of annual production of shirts, collars and cuffs in the City of Troy exceeded $5 million.
A rather large factory was established in Grafton by the brothers Scriven, which, according to a timeline compiled by Warren Broderick, produced 216,000 shirts in the year 1869. The Scriven shirt factory continued in operation until a fire in 1925 closed it down.
There was also a large branch of the Hall and Hartwell shirt factory established in Hoosick Falls in 1879, which in 1891 employed 200 people and produced 480,000 shirts annually. The stock came to it from the Troy factory all cut, was sewn into shirts and returned to Troy for finishing, packing and sale. Much of the work was done outside the factory as piecework by women in their own homes. The factory continued in operation until the late 1920s.
There was also a shirt factory in Petersburgh, next to the railroad station off Depot Road.
The biggest firm in Troy was Cluett Peabody. The Cluetts started out in the shirt business around 1850, and grew larger than all the others through constant innovation. In the 1950s and 1960s they were still among the Fortune 500 (the 500 largest companies in America). Sanford Cluett, who spent the first 18 years of his career working for the Walter Wood Mowing and Reaping Company in Hoosick Falls, joined Cluett Peabody in 1919 and in 1930 invented the “Sanforizing” process which helped Cluett Peabody to stay on top of the shirt-making business. His former estate in Williamstown has now been transformed into the Pine Cobble School.
Shirt bosoms were in use at the time of the American Revolution. According to an affidavit of Betsy Ross’s daughter given in 1871, one of the main reasons why George Washington knew Betsy Ross and thought of her when the new nation needed a flag, was because she had made shirt bosoms for him. She said her mother “was previously well acquainted with Washington, and that he had often been in her house on friendly visits, as well as on business. She had embroidered ruffles for his shirt bosoms and cuffs, and that it was partly owing to his friendship for her that she was chosen to make the flag.”