TIMELINE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Anne Green Winslow and Charity Clarke
Seventeen girls and women in 1766 each walked in to a large white house in Providence Rhode Island with all the wool and yarn they could gather. They began to spin and weave to protest taxes by making their own cloth so it would not have to be imported from England. "Whether they knew it or not, they had started a movement" is stated in the book We were there too! by Phillip Hoose. Somehow the word had spread quickly that they had to move their separate meeting to a court house. Soon they had "patriotic sewing circles" all over New England protesting against England and its loyalist followers. Four hundred spinning wheels had been built in Boston alone! In 1768 the entire graduating class of Harvard had gotten their diplomas in homespun and Brown did the same the next year.