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70 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. as to the English educated eye. Recognizing this mistake, an eminent English carpet-manufacturer remarked to one of our own at the Ex hibition, “ We seem to be playing at cross-purposes; while we are manufacturing for the supposed American taste, you manufacture for our own.” The carpet-manufacture of the United States has become so charac teristic a feature of the American textile industry, that this report would be incomplete without a brief sketch of the steps by which it has reached its vast development. In the middle of the last century, a carpet was regarded as a curiosity in our most luxurious city of that period, Philadelphia; but, as early as 1791, a carpet-manufactory was established by Mr. William Sprague, which attracted so much atten tion as to induce Mr. Hamilton, in his famous report on manufactures, of that date, to recommend a duty on imported carpets, as an encour- agement to home industry. The census of 1810 has been referred to as an authority for the statement that, in that year, 9984 yards of carpet and coverlid, worth $7500, were made in Philadelphia. The value indicates either the small proportion of carpets made or their very low value. No exact dates as to the further extension of this manufacture appear until 1825, at which time it seems that Mr. Alex ander Wright, a native of Scotland,—who with others had previously started a small establishment for making carpets in Medway, Massa chusetts, visited a small carpet-factory in Philadelphia to learn the mysteries of the art. Meeting with no success, he went to Scotland, where he purchased looms, with which he returned to this country, accompanied by Glaude and William Wilson, who were employed by him to aid in operating his machinery, and who subsequently made considerable improvements in the Jacquard attachments to carpet- looms. The location of the works not being favorable, the property was sold to Mr. Frederick Cabot and Mr. Patrick T. Jackson, well known as among the founders of the cotton-manufacture of New Eng land. In 1828, Messrs. Cabot & Jackson sold the mill and machinery at Medway to the Lowell Manufacturing Company, which had been recently organized for the manufacture of carpets and cotton goods, the carpet machinery in the mean time being kept in operation until the mill at Lowell was completed. It should be observed that carpet- weaving at Medway, as well as that first undertaken at Lowell, was done 011 hand-looms. It is within the personal recollection of the writer, that at about this time the manufacture of ingrain carpets was undertaken at Great Falls, in New Hampshire, by power, the apparatus for making the figure automatically being a large cylinder or drum, upon which pins