Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1895 — SPIDER FARM. [ARTICLE]

SPIDER FARM.

A QUEER INDUSTRY IN PENNSYLVANIA. An Old Frenchman Sells the Spiders to Wine Merchants-- Making Now Bottles Look Like Old. There is but one s ider farm in the United States. As far as a writer for the Philadelphia Press can learn there are only two in the world. One has only to go four miles from Philadelphia on the old Lancaster pike and ask for the farm of Pierre Grantaire to see what can be foupd nowhere else in tliis country, and abroad only in a little French village in the department of the Loire. Pierre Grantaire furnishes spiders at so much per hundred for distribution in the wine vaults of the merchant and the nouveaux riche. His trade is chiefly with the wholesale merchant, who is able to stock a cellar with new, shining, freshly labelled bottles, and in three months see them veiled In filmy cobwebs, so that the effect of twenty years of storage is secured at a small cost. The Lancaster pike is an old, old highway that trembled to the tramp of marching columns in the Revolution. In one of the low, stone farmhouses, huge as to chimney, lives Pierre Cifantaire, a veteran of the French army, who was conscripted as a middle aged man from his father’s farm in ’7O to fight the Prussians. For ten years he has lived here, a rather unique figure among the matter of fact farmers around him.

Old Grantaire has a wonderful vegetable farm, and sends in the choicest “green stuff" that is displayed in the Philadelphia markets. His neighbors know that he is a market gardener, and also raises mushrooms, and rather envy him the returns from his squabs, that retail at sixty cents a pair this time of year. But few of them know of the spider raising industry, which makes a substantial part of Pierre’s business. It is not to the old man's interest to have this advertised, and he seldom takes a caller into the two rooms of his dwelling where his multi-legged pets cover the walls and weave their gossamer patterns everywhere. It was a bit shuddering for the visitor, who had been brought up to smash a spider with a slipper or whatever came handiest, to be brought into a room where there were spiders in front of him, spiders to the rear of him, myriads of spiders on even' hand.

The walls were covered by wire squares from six inches to a foot across, like magnified sections of the wire fence used to enclose poultry yards. Behind these wire screens the walls had been covered with rough planking. There were cracks between the boards, apparently left with design, and their weather beaten surfaces were dotted with knotholes and splintered crevices. Long tables running the length of the room were covered with small wire frames, wooden boxes and glass jars. All of these wires in the room were covered over by patterns of lace tracery, in the geometrical outlines fashioned by the spider artists, inspired by the mysterious Instinct which has made them weave their filmy snares in the same fashion since the world began. The sunlight streamed through the open door and the room seemed hung with curtains of elfin woven lacework. The king of the fairy palace rapped his stubby pipe against the door, and the webs were dotted with black spots as the spiders scampered from their retreats in the wall cracks and a score of villainous looking pets as big as half dollars emerged from their crannies on the table and clustered against their glass roofing. “They think I feed them now,’’ said Pierre, “but I fool them for you. They have brains, these little creatures. Ah, they are cunning! After you see them and I tell you of them you will never crush them more; you will say, “The spider can teach me something. I will watch him. He is a diplomat, an architect, a mathematician. His knowledge is worth having. Don’t knock him off. He will not bite you. They are harmless. He wishes to make your acquaintance.’’ “You wish to know of the business first? That is like you people —money first, then the sentiment. There are 2,000 spiders in this room, all raising families and minding their own business. Is not that a teaching to the world and a lesson already? You see, in these frames I breed my pets, and when the infants are big enough to run about I take them into the next room, where they can set up for themselves, as you say. It is from there I sell most. They are great cannibals, my pets; they eat their children and the children each other. So I must get a good price for those that survive their childhood.

“ It is not all kinds of spiders that make webs. There are those that live in holes in the ground, and make for themselves trap doors, and some make soft nests in cracks, while others spin small homes in the grass or in the room corner. No, indeed; I have sought out kinds that weave themselves fine large webs of lines and circles. They only look artistic in the wine cellar or on the bouteille. They are the selected ones. “A customer comes to me. He is a wine merchant from New York or Philadelphia, or perhaps he writes. He says that he has just stocked a cellar with five-year-old port or Burgundy, or something else. The bottles have been brushed clean in shipping. They look new and common. They will not sell for old wine. He has attached to them labels of twenty, thirty or forty years ago, some year of a grand vintage. He tells me so many hundred bottles. I know how many of my pets will soon cover his cellar in cobwebs of the finest old kind. I put them in little small paper boxes, a pair in a box. I ship them in a crate, with many holes for air. Maybe I send two, three, four hundred spiders. For them I ask half a franc each. $lO for every hundred. In two months you would think this cellar was not disturbed for the last fifty years. It has cost him S4O or SSO maybe, but he may sell the wine for sl,ooo—yes, more than that—above what they had

brought without my pets had dressed the bottles in the robes ol long ago. - ’