From the very first time that I saw a picture of the Hathorn American Spinner, I was intrigued.
It had a small, flat, oddly shaped base with multiple holes drilled into it and an upright mounted in one corner. The drive wheel was mounted to one side of the base and it appeared that the spinner would sit facing the drive wheel but the spindle was off to the side of the base, obviously in the right position for let handed drafting, and yet it in no way lined up with the rim of the drive wheel. The wheel also had a skeiner mounted vertically on the base. How could such a Rube Goldberg looking contraption with a drive band that appeared to turn at a 90 degree angle ever work? Being rather addicted to odd spinning wheels, I was hooked.

Ten years after seeing that picture, I finally found one. While it was incomplete, it lacked only the skein winder. I figured that someday I’d take it to Ron Antoine who is an expert at restoring antique spinning wheels, and have a new skeiner made.



“Someday” rolled around last week. My antique Swedish wheel suffered a broken leg while being transported to a show and, since it’s one of my favorite wheels, I’d made arrangements to take it to Ron’s “hospital” for repairs. At the last minute I decided to take the Hathorn wheel along to see if he could make a new skeiner for it.

We dealt with the Swedish wheel first. The leg that broke had been repaired before but that repair had been fragile due to insect damage to the wood. Ron recommended that a complete new leg be made to ensure that the repair held up and this is what is being done.

That left the Hathorn wheel to deal with. Hathorn wheels were originally patented in 1871 by George H. Hathorn of Bangor, Maine. It is thought that Mr. Hathorn based his patent on a very similar wheel, known as the Hurdy Wheel, patented by John Henry Nute in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1870. A case of a stolen patent? Probably not as there is evidence that Mr. Nute was born in the USA and that Mr. Hathorn was married to a woman by the name of Phebe Nute which makes it quite likely that the two men worked together to develop these small, wheel driven spindles and obtained patents for slightly differing models in two different countries.

While Ron had restored one of Nute’s Hurdy wheels before, this was his first encounter with a Hathorn. He got out his reference books and we set to work figuring out how the skein winder would attach to the base and exactly how it should be constructed. Ron was confident that he could figure it out and I left the wheel with him.

Once back home, I did some more research on the wheel and turned up an article on restoring A Hathorn Wheel in issue #43 of “The Spinning Wheel Sleuth” which answered many of our questions. I also located a source for the original patent drawings. Meantime, Ron had been hard at work trying to decipher the old label on the base of the wheel, which also turned out to be a valuable source of information. As it turns out, this is a multi-purpose machine: it can be used to spin yarn, as a skeiner, as a reel, and as a quiller depending on how the various parts are assembled and on how the drive band is configured. I can’t wait until it’s complete and back home!