Iowa's First Master Weaver

"Daniel Stephenson - Iowa's First Master Weaver" is an excerpt from the film "Ahead of Their Time". ©2022 Fair Field Productions
To watch the trailer or stream the entire film, visit www.vimeo.com/ondemand/aheadoftheirtime
Daniel Stephenson came from an English family of weavers. He brought his loom to Fairfield, Iowa in 1852, setting up shop at 304 East Burlington Avenue. Local children would press up against windows to watch and listen to the shuttle flying on the only machine in town, powered only by Stephenson’s foot. Stephenson used a Jacquard mechanical loom. This technology was developed in France in 1803 by a weaver named Joseph Marie Jacquard. It controls every warp thread that goes from the front to the back of the loom individually. Because it can do that, it is able to create very complex, fancy patterns in the cloth more quickly and with greater accuracy than the technology available before this loom was invented.
Stephenson’s complex designs were made possible by punch cards read by the apparatus on the second floor, telling the loom what pattern to create. The holes in the cards were read by a series of pins that directed what threads below should be raised for each pass of the shuttle across the board.
If you look closely, these cards look quite similar to the computer punchcards from the early days of computer technology, which carried instructions that told the early computers what kind of calculations to do.
Daniel Stephenson wove coverlets using the most advanced technology of the day from locally carded wool that he dyed himself. His draft book, now in the Art Institute in Chicago, is filled with original artistic designs for coverlets he created here in Fairfield from 1852-1877. Although he charged only $3.50 each, today, these same coverlets are seen as multi-generational heirlooms and can occasionally be found at the auctions of fine art collectors.
Stephenson's draft book, now in the Art Institute in Chicago, is filled with original artistic designs for coverlets. Stephenson Today, they are multi-generational heirlooms and expensive collector’s items.
The loom used by Daniel Stephenson was a direct predecessor of the computer technology that we all use today.
All of the master weaver's coverlets bore the legend: "Made by D. Stephenson, Fairfield, Jefferson County, Iowa," and the date, woven into the fabric in well-formed and conspicuous letters.