This Woman Entrepreneur Turned Grass Into Bonnets

Image created by ChatGPT prompt: Sophia Woodhouse's 1819 straw hat

Going back in time, Sophia Woodhouse was born in Wethersfield in 1799. She and her family lived on Main Street in town, and she would go to the meadows to pick grass. But what she did with the grass was groundbreaking.

“She went and picked the grass and discovered a method of turning it into beautiful bonnets,” said Gillie Johnson, Wethersfield Historical Society. “And in 1819 she entered the Hartford Agricultural Society’s Cattle Show and Fair and displayed a bonnet that dazzled people and what was popular at the time were Leghorn bonnets from Italy, and people said her bonnet was just as good if not better than those bonnets.”

Sophia Woodhouse turned her bonnet making into a business, creating a cottage industry. She is known today as one of the first female entrepreneurs of the greater Hartford, Connecticut area, even earning a patent for her design in 1821.

Two first ladies, Dolley Madison and Louisa Adams, wore her design. President John Quincy Adams called the bonnets “an extraordinary specimen of American manufacturing.”

Who Made It Possible to Make Beautiful Bonnets?

Every Easter, people all over the world unknowingly pay homage to the first woman to obtain a U.S. patent in her name in 1809, Mary Dixon Kies.

A professor by the name of Autumn Stanley believes it was a machine patent which automated the manual techniques of weaving straw with silk that previously enabled women to make hats in their homes. 

Read the entire story on how a cottage industry was born.  

Meanwhile, put on your mask and fancy bonnet, and have yourself a very Happy Easter.