Sawyer Woolen Mills records

Incomplete records of a family woolen firm in Dover, New Hampshire, which began as F. A. and J. Sawyer, became Sawyer's Mills, Sawyer Woolen Mills, and Sawyer Woolen Company. There are daybooks, cash books, production and sales records, and unbound papers, the last-mentioned for the 1894-1900 period. F. A. and J. Sawyer were selling agents. The business was taken over by the American Woolen Company in 1899.

The earliest time book, from 1858 to 1861, shows a very small minority of women workers beginning to be hired in the finishing mills in 1860; rent rolls from the same period show only one woman tenant and fifteen men. By 1893, many more women had been hired, with sixty women working in the finishing room and smaller numbers of women working alongside men in the carding, combing, weaving, and spinning rooms. The wool room and dye house continued to employ only men.