FLYMPH FORUM
A forum to discuss tying and fishing wingless wet flies and other soft hackle fly patterns
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Mills imported flies from England, the world supplier of commercial flies for many years, but Alfred Miller (Sparse Grey Hackle) writes: "Three of Thomas Bates Mills six children became active in the William Mills business - Eddie, the caster; "old" Arthur: and Chester, who because of delicate health established himself at Geneva, NY in the beautiful Finger Lakes district and set up a flytying project that supplied the firm with most of its American-made flies for some forty years." So there's a very good chance that these flies were tied in Upstate NY. I've always wanted to research the Mills flytying operation in Geneva, which is just a few minutes from my home town of Skaneateles, but have never had the time to do so.ForumGhillie wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 7:47 am bb, I hope you will remember to take those with you this Spring to NW WI outing. <hint! hint!>
Where would those flies have been made?
per dozen... $1.50. How the hell did they make money????
John
Wow, great post. So much history...Greenwell wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 11:15 amMills imported flies from England, the world supplier of commercial flies for many years, but Alfred Miller (Sparse Grey Hackle) writes: "Three of Thomas Bates Mills six children became active in the William Mills business - Eddie, the caster; "old" Arthur: and Chester, who because of delicate health established himself at Geneva, NY in the beautiful Finger Lakes district and set up a flytying project that supplied the firm with most of its American-made flies for some forty years." So there's a very good chance that these flies were tied in Upstate NY. I've always wanted to research the Mills flytying operation in Geneva, which is just a few minutes from my home town of Skaneateles, but have never had the time to do so.ForumGhillie wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 7:47 am bb, I hope you will remember to take those with you this Spring to NW WI outing. <hint! hint!>
Where would those flies have been made?
per dozen... $1.50. How the hell did they make money????
John
They made money because the average worker made less than $1.00 an hour at that time. Women made even less than men and then as now constituted the bulk of commercial tiers. For a bit of perspective consider that in 1914 Ford doubled his workers' wages from $2.50 to $5 per day. In 1914, $1.50 was equal to $37.68 today! So actually, a dozen flies in 1914 cost pretty close to what they would cost today in buying power. By 1930, the $1.50 dozen flies were equivalent to $21.91 in today's money and a Leonard Catskill rod at $50.00 would have been equal to $733.00, about what a top of the line graphite costs now.
This nails it. Some are nylon, some are gut --but all of the ads say "gut"--so the packaging probably pre-dates some of the flies snelled with nylon.
John, for centuries prints were made by cutting the image into wood blocks which were set up with the type to illustrate printed materials, books, newspapers, catalogs, etc. Many of the earlier angling books contain such illustrations. I actually mistyped and meant steelcuts as the process moved on to using steel or copper printing plates rather than the earlier wood blocks. Steel and copper plates contained much finer detail than woodcuts. However, the term "cut" lasted for many years as a kind of shorthand description for any black and white illustration and you may see something like "refer to cut on page 123" in older books and catalogs.
