HPLACE OF THE OILCLOTH INDUSTRY.

In Kennebec County, Me., is the quiet borough of East Winthrop, for
more than half a century known wherever oilcloth carpeting was used as
Baileyville.

Were it not for the inventive brain of one of East Winthrop's early
inhabitants, says a contemporary, the village would hardly be known
across the lake, but early in the present century one of the numerous
family of Maine Baileys evolved a scheme to fill his purse faster than
the slow process of nature was likely to do it in growing crops.

Oilcloth carpetings were not known in the long ago, when Ezekiel
Bailey pictured in his mind how they might be made, and it was in the
little hamlet of East Winthrop that the conceit of their manufacture
was hatched and executed. Ezekiel Bailey was, in the days prior to the
war of 1812, looked upon as a very likely boy. He was studious and
industrious, and while other boys of the village were out in the white
oak groves setting box traps for gray squirrels, and spearing pickerel
by torch light in the waters of Cobosseecontee, Ezekiel was busy in
his little workshop fashioning useful things to be used about the
house.

Just how and when and where he was prompted to attempt the making of
oilcloth carpet nobody now living at East Winthrop seems to know. Many
of the burghers thought he was "a-wastin' uv his time," but they
thought different some years later when great factories for the
manufacture of oilcloth floor carpeting were erected in East Winthrop,
Hallowell, New Jersey, and other places.

And Ezekiel? He amassed a considerable fortune and left the path of
life much easier for his kin to pursue. Having met a peddler one day,
he bought a table cover made of a combination of burlap and paint.
Such things were a luxury in the country at that time, and Ezekiel
Bailey was shrewd enough to foresee a big demand for them if the cost
could be moderated a bit. While thinking, an idea came to him, and
following the idea a small voice which whispered: "Make 'em yourself."
He decided to try, and there is a legend to the effect that half the
farmers of the village quit work to see the first table cover.

Procuring a square of burlap, or rather enough burlap from which to
fashion a square of the desired size, Ezekiel Bailey framed up the
fabric as the good old grandmas used to hitch up quilts at a quilting
bee, the only difference being that the burlap was framed or stretched
over a table made of planed