A shrieking wind, and an angry sea seemingly set to drown Key Biscayne and everyone on it, drove John Dubose to seek safety in an upper story of the Cape Florida lighthouse. Unlike many seafarers who relied on that beacon for guidance, those dwelling on the Cape survived the September 1835 hurricane. Anything not secured to the ground, however, was swept away by the surging waters, which reached a height of four feet.
In the storm’s aftermath, Dubose took stock of what was left. His poultry were carried off. The lighthouse boat had slipped its moorings and was found deposited on dry land. And the mulberry trees he’d planted showed no sign of life, “there being at that day not the least appearance of a bud.”
In his tenth year as inaugural keeper of the lighthouse, the first built in Florida south of St. Augustine, John Dubose had appeared since 1832 on the payroll of William A. Whitehead, who as customs collector at Key West had the oversight of this, three other lighthouses, and one lightship, strung along the 200-mile arc of the Florida Reef. The Cape Florida lightkeeper simultaneously served Whitehead as an inspector of the customs for the easternmost part of his district.
But Dubose answered to a different authority as well.
Henry Perrine, a New Jersey-born medical doctor turned horticulturist, had developed a complex plan to colonize the south of Florida with tropical and exotic species. It was an idea to which he committed his worldly fortunes, and would one day sacrifice his life. From the diplomatic post he held at Campeche, Mexico, Perrine sent to Dubose and other experimenters dozens of plants and seed samples to test their viability in South Florida’s soil and near-tropical climate. Even Whitehead, at the custom house on Key West, received one of Perrine’s more unusual shipments. It consisted of cactus plants, hives of stingless bees from the Yucatán, and a pair of ill-starred rabbits: a questionable offering at best.
Perrine didn’t limit his trials to species from a single continent. Hence the plantings on Key Biscayne, while small and experimental, included two kinds of mulberry tree: the paper mulberry (Morus papyrifera), which Dubose reported “grew finely” on the island and “became of some size,” and its near relative the fast-growing white mulberry, of the variety known as Morus multicaulis, original to Asia and introduced to the West (as Perrine believed) from the Philippines.
While Dubose’s trees of the former type would perish in the floodwaters of 1835, the multicaulis within a month of the storm sported an “abundance of well grown and ripe mulberries….” A score more of young multicaulis were introduced to the lighthouse gardens that fall, and two years later they were growing still.
“These plants thrive well in this climate at all seasons,” Dubose found, and eventually he learned they could be easily propagated from cuttings. “At the time I received them, I was unacquainted with their nature and value. … [O]ne planted in my garden on the main grew so rapidly, that I have often been obliged to cut all the limbs off, say six feet long; and as I did not know that they would grow, they were thrown away.”
A few months after the hurricane, Indian hostilities forced Dubose to abandon his lighthouse duties and the mulberry nursery. Had he stayed, he believed he could, after two years, have boasted an orchard of 2,000 trees. Henry Perrine’s expectations were even more extravagant: “Had Mr. Dubose known the nature of the Manilla mulberry, or Morus multicaulis, and the best treatment of it in a tropical climate, he might now have multiplied these plants a million fold.”
Perrine’s experiments aimed at nothing less than a revolution in American farming, but his aspirations were only incidentally commercial, extending well beyond the realm of agriculture or science. By cultivating non-native species in a landscape often seen as hostile to husbandry and even to human occupation, Perrine hoped to break cotton’s grip on the Old South, staunch the exodus of a white “yeomanry” heading for better and cheaper land in the west, and reduce sectional strife by inoculating the country against “fanatical” abolitionist sentiment, or an insurgency or infiltration by “inferior” races.
Without touching on specifics or these more unsettling undercurrents in Perrine’s thought, Whitehead offered to the project what encouragement he could: “your undertaking, if successful, will eventually prove highly important to the interests of the Union,” he wrote. But as a customs officer, Whitehead couldn’t help wondering how the crops Perrine wished to raise would compete with the same commodities imported from abroad, “most, if not all of the produce of the plants being free from duty….” Whether from an appreciation of its complexity, a grasp of Perrine’s physical fragility or a presentiment of his violent end, Whitehead thought it unlikely that the originator of this elaborate endeavor would benefit personally from any eventual success. As he said to Perrine, “I doubt if you will be the one to profit by that result.”
Why, in this ambitious scheme, had Perrine assigned such primacy to Morus multicaulis? And what obliged John Dubose to assure him that no one in the Florida peninsula had raised this variety before?
Nature invested the multicaulis with a peculiar appeal that made Perrine keenly interested in its cultivation. It was not for ornament that he wished to nurture it, nor for its sturdy and durable wood, nor even for its fruit. The tree’s value, instead, was innate in its leaves, of which the “unappreciated climate of our southern Florida” virtually insured an unending supply. This attraction had been firmly impressed on Dubose who wrote, “One great advantage we will always have over our Northern friends, in the cultivation of the Morus multicaulis, is the fact that the tree does not cast its leaves through the winter, but is at all times in a situation to afford food for the silkworm.”
Domestic silkworms, the larvae of the moth species Bombyx mori, have been bred for more than five millennia in China, where the leaves of the mulberry were found to be their favored food. After a month feeding on these leaves, the worms enclose themselves in cocoons, each consisting of a single filament of raw silk as long as 3,000 feet. The process of making silk for human use begins by meticulously unwinding, then combining the filaments from several cocoons to form a basic thread. This thread becomes the fundamental component of standard sewing thread, and innumerable fabrics and manufactured articles.
In their exploration and exploitation of other continents, Europeans could not but be enticed by the potential to enlarge and control the supply of this valuable commodity. When, in the early nineteenth century, the United States sought a measure of economic autonomy to match its lately-won political independence, the creation of a domestic silk culture would have no shortage of adherents. Henry Perrine and his growers could be counted among these, if lacking the single-mindedness or luck needed to bring it to fruition.
Having heard and read Henry Perrine’s adulation of Florida and its “more genial” climate as providing the best conditions for growing non-native species, William Whitehead may have been somewhat surprised, when he resettled in the North, to be met there with a frenzy for mulberry and silk cultivation. “The climate of every State in the Union is adapted to the culture of silk,” an 1830 Congressional report had proclaimed, confident that enough of the material would soon be produced for export as well as domestic consumption.
Even before that, the American Institute, whose yearly fairs in New York City gave public exposure to products of both factories and farms, had been awarding medals and commendations to local growers of cocoons and producers of fine silk. Many of these were farmers in Whitehead’s native state, including two who became prominent publicists for the industry: Jersey City’s Charles F. Durant, member of a loose circle of science-minded men with whom Whitehead had been associated as a youth; and Monmouth County minister Donald V. McLean, a future collaborator (and sometime antagonist) of Whitehead’s in the enterprise that would lead, in the 1840s, to creation of the New Jersey Historical Society.
By 1838, when Whitehead exchanged his Key West home for a new life in the urban North, the fervor for domestic silk culture, and the easily propagated multicaulis in particular, had reached unthinkable heights. State legislatures, including New Jersey’s, were prevailed upon to encourage the industry with financial incentives. New trees were under cultivation in prodigious numbers–a Newark newspaper estimated 320,000 “in the immediate vicinity of our city”–and seeds or cuttings of the valuable multicaulis were everywhere for sale. The Cheney brothers, experienced growers from Connecticut, set up a mulberry plantation and “cocoonery” at Burlington, New Jersey, and from there issued a monthly magazine, one of many such journals devoted to silk growing.
The press carried occasional warnings about excessive speculation, exaggerated quantities of trees for sale, and even blatant fraud. But what brought the “mulberry mania” of the late 1830s to an end were a dearth of expertise and infrastructure, and a serious downturn in the economy overall. Not a few fortunes were wiped out when the bubble finally burst.
If only because of his past acquaintance with Henry Perrine, Whitehead observed the national silk-growing frenzy with interest. But when he undertook to comment on it, he did so from an unusual vantage point. In searching for “historical matter” related to William Franklin, New Jersey’s last royal governor, Whitehead had found a precedent in the colonial records for legislative support of silk production. In 1839 the Newark Daily Advertiser, soon to become the repository of many historical articles from his pen, printed the report of this finding, which its author offered, perhaps tongue in cheek, “as a contribution to the ‘Annals of Silk Culture’ in New Jersey.”
The opening pages of those “annals” would have hardly seemed propitious. Although the mulberry tree was observed to flourish in southern New Jersey, no notice of silkworms or silk culture is found in the earliest descriptions. Promotional tracts had assured potential settlers that “the Art, Use, and Excellency of the Silk-Worm might be had in this Province, with great Conveniency; the Mulberry-Trees growing there Wild, very numerous, and the Leaves to be had for the gathering….” But there was no first-hand experience behind such claims. Agriculture and manufacturing in New Jersey’s first centuries could make only modest progress, as British colonial policy tended to hinder their development except as components of a unified imperial system.
The stimulus to provincial New Jersey’s silk culture emanated chiefly from Governor Franklin’s famous father. Through two learned societies–the American Philosophical Society, which he co-founded in Philadelphia in 1743, and the Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London, of which he was a corresponding member from 1756–Benjamin Franklin became the most visible, most ardent proponent of silk manufacture in the colonies. At his instigation, the Society for Arts (known today as the Royal Society of Arts) began to encourage silk production in America through privately funded bounties and premiums.
Franklin’s son, who assumed the governorship of New Jersey in February 1763, was himself elected a corresponding member of the Society for Arts in the same month. Three years later, addressing the New Jersey Assembly convened at Burlington, where he would reside until 1774, the governor made known his desire to see the province’s inhabitants “turning their Attention to the Cultivation and production of such Articles as might serve for Remittances to the Mother Country: and which, at the same time that they tended to her Advantage might prove beneficial to the Colony.”
William Franklin urged that a bounty be offered for growing hemp and flax, to complement incentives already provided by Parliament, and in the same address referred to the “handsome premiums” awarded by the Society for Arts “for the Encouragement of the Culture of Silk, and the making of Wine and Potash in America,” suggesting the legislature likewise give encouragement to “the Production of those Valuable Articles.”
The Assembly, “with a View of stimulating our Inhabitants to future Industry and Wealth, in a Way hitherto but little used in this Government,” obligingly approved bounties for the raising of hemp and flax valid for two years and three months, and a bounty for mulberry trees to last a full seven years, until 1772. The former bounties were later extended, so as to expire at the same time as the one on mulberry trees.
Franklin meanwhile showed a deep personal interest in agriculture, entreating his father in London to forward details of the latest discoveries and improvements in husbandry. “I have entered far into the Spirit of Farming,” he declared in 1769, having recently expanded the acreage he farmed outside Burlington, “on very reasonable Terms. It is now altogether a very valuable and pleasant Place.” While we don’t know whether the governor raised mulberry trees, it’s certain that others, many of them women, were growing them and raising cocoons for silk nearby.
In 1770, the Contributors for Promoting the Culture of Silk advertised the establishment of a “filature” for the unwinding of silk cocoons on Seventh Street in Philadelphia. The managers would pay for cocoons raised “in Pennsylvania, Jersies, Maryland, and lower counties of Delaware,” and award premiums to the most prolific producers. By its second year the filature had provided ample demonstration of New Jersey’s success in silk production: a third of the cocoons it purchased came from the other side of the Delaware River, and two-fifths of its premiums were paid to Jersey farmers.
In London, Benjamin Franklin was delighted to receive shipments from that and the next season’s crop. “I am charmed with the sight of such a quantity the second year,” he said, “and have great hopes the produce will now be established.” His son, however, had grown anxious. Perhaps out of a sense that it was meant primarily to “serve for Remittances to the Mother Country,” no one had ever applied for the bounty on raising mulberry trees. Supposing that New Jerseyans were just becoming “sensible of the Advantages which might accrue to them from the Culture of Silk,” the governor urged the renewal of that bounty, set to expire in October 1772. But it failed in committee, and the other bounties, originally adopted with it seven years earlier, were likewise allowed to expire.
Burgeoning discontent with British policies, of course, had made a continuance of silk culture on the former terms less likely. And with “the dark clouds of the revolution” gathering above them, as Whitehead observed, Assembly members became preoccupied by more urgent concerns. “From that time until late years the subject was never brought to the attention of the Legislature so far as I can learn.” Colonial documents he gathered and studied in the years to come would support this conclusion.
Despite the Revolution, and the republican distrust of luxury goods as aristocratic trappings, despite the short-lived multicaulis craze and the “revulsion of public feeling” that followed, silk would never be without its true believers. Its manufacture was to have a rebirth, infamously in New Jersey, through an infusion of capital, mechanization and cheap immigrant labor. But the mulberry tree now serves as little more than an embellishment to New Jersey’s landscape, while the lowly silkworm plies its craft in regions more distant, surely, than Henry Perrine would have wished.
Copyright © 2025 Gregory J. Guderian
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