Thomas Reed Cooksey (circa 1726-1783) lived in Trinity Parish on a farm located along what is now Trinity Church Road near Charlotte Hall, Maryland. The farm contained 130 contiguous acres and there was also an additional 20 acres of woodland located nearby.[i] During the 20 years that Thomas and his wife Elizabeth Barnes, the widow Matthews, lived on the farm, they raised a family of at least eight children: 3 children by Elizabeth’s first marriage – Catherine (1750-1784), Mary (born 1752) and Thomas Matthews (1755-1796) – and five of their own children – Henry (1758-1816), Victory (born 1761), James (1762-1829), Sarah (born 1765), and Jane Cooksey (born 1769). The household in 1783 also included seven enslaved individuals: George (age 45), Chloe (age 35), Nell (age 32), Sarah (age 25), Henney (age 13), Charity (age 3), and Mary (age 1).[ii]
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Trinity Episcopal Church The Parish was established in 1744 and the church was built in 1756. The church was only a few miles from the Cooksey home. Thomas Cooksey was the Church Warden from 1779 until his death in 1783. |
Thomas and his sons and the enslaved man George worked the land raising wheat, oats, and corn. In 1783, the stock on the farm included a yoke of oxen, six steers, five cows, six yearling cattle, a calf, five sows and their piglets, 24 hogs, ten shoats, and 39 sheep. The inventory of Thomas’s personal estate taken in July 1783 a few months after his death, makes no mention of tobacco, either in the field or in the cask ready for market.[iii] This seems rather strange given that tobacco was the cash crop of almost every farm in the Chesapeake Region. It also raises an interesting question as to why there was no tobacco in Thomas’s inventory. The answer to that question lies in the economic conditions that existed in the American Colonies during the Revolutionary War.
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Virginia Tobacco Harvest Sydney E. King 1956 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tobacco_Farming.jpg |
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The 10th Clause of the Articles of Association Maryland Gazette, 3 November 1774, page 2 |
When the war began, Thomas was about 50 years old and his sons Henry and James were 18 and 15 years old respectively. While many of his kin and neighbors enlisted in the Continental Army, neither Thomas nor his two sons did. Thomas was too old to fight and James was too young.
The picture that emerges from Thomas’s inventory is not of a tobacco plantation but a farm geared to war time production. Throughout the war there was a tremendous push by the Continental Army for farmers to produce wheat and other food stores.[v] Thomas and his sons had no market for tobacco, nor could they purchase British goods and so they switched gears, producing wheat, oats, and corn instead of tobacco. They also raised hogs, butchering them for home use, and possibly to supply the army with salt pork.
The women living on the farm, both free and enslaved, also produced goods for the war time economy. The inventory makes it clear that they spent a great deal of time producing textiles. The family owned 39 sheep in 1783, far more sheep than needed for domestic production.
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Colonial Era Sheep Breed in Colonial Williamsburg Before Shearing |
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| Hetchel with Flax Philipsburg Manor, Sleepy Hollow, New York. 24 November 2003 |
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| Flax after spinning Philipsburg Manor, Sleepy Hollow, New York. 24 November 2003 |
The inventory also lists raw wool and cotton in the seed. While cotton was not a staple crop in Maryland, it was grown in gardens as early as the 1730s. As only the seed is listed, it’s possible that Thomas was planning to plant cotton that spring.
In among the kitchen items were 25 iron pots, an excessive amount for normal cooking and laundry tasks. Some of these pots may have been used for dying linen and wool yarn.
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Wool Dyeing Demostration Mount Vernon, Virginia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmOJsBo6aw |
The women in the household included Elizabeth Cooksey and her daughters Sarah, Victory, and Jane (who were in their teens and early 20s during the war), as well as the enslaved women Chloe, Nell, and Sarah. These seven women probably spun the flax and wool on the spinning wheels. The younger enslaved children would be given the task of carding the wool before it was spun. Once the yarn was produced it was dyed using locally available plants. The women, and possibly the men, used the loom to weave linen for undergarments, shirts, bandages, and sheets, and the wool was used for clothing and blankets.[vi] While some of the textile product was probably for the family’s consumption, many farmers and their families during this period were engaged in this home based industry that produced cloth and clothing for their neighbors and for the Continental army.
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Colonial Williamsburg Weavers and Spinners During the War small textile manufactories sprang up throughout the colonies The Cooksey family had a number of people, both free and enslaved, employed in cloth production for home, local, and possibly the Continental Army's consumption https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Winter07/weaving.cfm |
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Display Concerning Home Manufacturing and Boycotts During the American Revolution Democracy Exhibit, Smithson's National Museum of History, Washington, D.C. Photograph taken on 26 April 2025 by the author. This is an excellant exhibit. Hopefully it won't be gutted by the executive order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/ |
Thomas Cooksey died at the end of the war, sometime between 14 February 1783, when he wrote his will and 8 April 1783, when it was admitted to the court for probate.[viii] While the British surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia on 28 September 1781, fighting continued in the Carolinas through December 1782. The Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war, was endorsed by Congress on 15 April 1783, a week after Thomas’s will was admitted for probate. The final signing of the treaty didn’t occur until 2 September 1783, months after Thomas’s death. His wife and daughters continued to live on the farm until at least 1800 when the property was sold to Thomas Dent.[ix] By then normal trade relations with England had resumed and Americans were once again importing cloth from England but in far lesser amounts than before the war. This wasn’t because domestic production continued at the same rate as before war, it was because the first American textile mill was established in 1793 in Rhode Island. By the War of 1812, there were 61 textile mills in the United States producing cloth for domestic consumption.[x] The colonial boycott helped to create a new American industry in the post-war era.
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Samuel Slater's 1793 Water Powered Cotton Spinning Mill Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park Pawtucket, Rhode Island https://www.nps.gov/places/slater-mill.htm |
For more information about homespun cloth production check out these videos:
Fiber Carding
in the 18th Century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYVRf2WkD5Q
Putting Color to Cloth/Dyeing Textiles on a Revolution
Era Tidewater Farm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIJYuLZaMH8
An Introduction to the Mechanics of the Spinning Wheel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M76Bl-YT-5k
18th-Century Weaving at Colonial Williamsburg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtz2Y8h5eLY
[i] Peter Wood to Thomas Reed Cooksey, 20 acres of “Woods Low Ground,” 1760, Charles County Land Records (CCLR) Liber G no. 3, folio 405; William Cooksey to Thomas Reed Cooksey, 9 acres of “Simpkin Coatback,” 1763, CCLR Liber L no. 3, folio 217; Justinian Cooksey to Thomas Reed Cooksey, 121 acres of “Simpkin Coat Back,” “Cooksey’s Chance,” and “Cookseys Duck Pond,” 1768, CCLR Liber O no, 3, folio 395.
[ii] Inventory of Thomas Reed Cooksey, 1783, Charles
County Probate Records (CCPR) Wills Liber 8, folio
192.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Maryland
Gazette, No. 1503, 30 June 1774, page 2. 1774 Articles of Association. National Archives Foundation. Electronic
Document. Accessed 12 April 2025. https://archivesfoundation.org/documents/1774-articles-association/
[v] Jean B. Lee. The
Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County. Norton, New
York, 1994
[vi] Hurst, Neil. Made in American: Resistance Through Homespun and the Rise of American Textile Manufacturing. Trend & Tradition Magazine. 2018 Electronic Document. Accessed 12 April 2025. https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/discover/resource-hub/trend-tradition-magazine/trend-tradition-spring-2018/made-in-american/[viii]
[vi] Klapthor, Margaret Brown and Paul Dennis Brown. History of Charles County, Maryland. Written in its tercentenary year of 1958. Charles County Tercentenary Commission, La Plata, Maryland, 1958. Trinity Parish Records, M258, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis.
[ix] Henry Cooksey
to Thomas Dent, “Simpkin Coatback”, 1800, CCLR Liber IB no. 3, folio 185.
[x] Conrad, James L. “Drive that Branch”: Samuel Slater,
the Power Loom, and the Writing of America’s Textile History. Technology and Culture 36(1):1-28, 1995.
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