Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 November 1879 — A Curious Industry. [ARTICLE]

A Curious Industry.

The principal industry of the town of West Falmouth, Mass., is tying business tags with bits of strings,’by which the tags may be attached to articles which require to be labeled. A correspondent writing from that village saps: "These tags are cut elsewhere and sent in bulk to West Falmouth. The string is also sent in skeins. The business here is to cut the string in suitable lengths, tie one into tach tag, and return it to the manufacturer in Boston. This sounds simple enough, and small enough, and yet it furnishes occupation to between three hundred and four hundred persons, and involves an elaborate system of bookkeeping. The business has been carried on by a woman for the last twenty years.' The orders which were once filled in a bushel basket now require large freight boxes, and amount to an aggregate of forty millions of tags in a year. The little pink strings are reeled off and cut in given lengths and bunches, each bunch having 101 strings. The strings are given out by the 1,010, together with the corresponding number of to people coming to the office tor them, and are paid for at the rate of twelve to seventeen cents a thousand. Young children tie with their mothers, ana even old men, and it is a great source of pin money in the community.” * ■ » Fringes, passementerie, seperate ornaments shaped to the figure, brande-bourgs, cords, tassels and painted ornaments for capping tassels are shown in great variety for dress and cloak trimmings.