the Stetson hat factory
Carroting and Pouncing
“Inside the wall stood a hospital, a savings bank, a brass band, a baseball club, and a Sunday school that called itself the largest on earth.”
About the Book
In 1865 John B. Stetson rented a room near Seventh and Callowhill with a hundred dollars and spent sixty of it on fur and tools. By 1906 he had nine acres at Fourth and Montgomery and a wall around them. It was the largest hat factory in the world.
Inside the wall stood a hospital, a savings bank, a brass band, a baseball club, and a Sunday school that called itself the largest on earth. The place could make two million hats a year.
First you brush rabbit fur with mercury dissolved in nitric acid. The tips turn orange, which is why the trade called it carroting. Then you bake the skins for twelve hours or more, and the mercury comes off into a low closed room, and a man breathes it. He gets the shakes. He can’t carry a full cup or sign his own name. He can’t work with the foreman watching. He is the quietest man in the room. Mad as a hatter, if it’s about him at all, gets him exactly backwards.
Carroting at one end. Pouncing, which means sandpaper, at the other. In between, four ounces of loose fur go into a kettle at a hundred and eighty degrees and come out a hat. Nothing is spun, woven, or stitched. It is beaten.
Twenty-six states dropped the mercury on 1 December 1941. Not for the hatters. The war wanted it for detonators.
Peroxide did the same job. (It always could have.)