From The Connecticut River Valley in Southern Vermont and New Hampshire: Historical Sketches by Lyman S. Hayes, Tuttle Co., Marble City Press, Rutland, VT., 1929, page 306:
BELLOWS FALLS ONCE BRED SILK WORMS AND PRODUCED REAL SILK
For some years between 1835 and 1845 Bellows Falls produced a quantity of silk, made from the coocoons of silk worm. At that time, as in various other decades, there was a wave of excitement in many places in the United States over the idea that fortunes could be made in this industry here as well as in other countries, but it has almost uniformly proved disastrous in this country.
The largest venture in this vicinity was made about 1838, when a number of citizens of Bellows Falls attempted it and continued the business four or five years. The two leading spirits in the enterprise were Dr. Artemus Robbins, a local physician who had accumulated considerable property, and Rufus Guild, a local merchant. The propagation of the silk worm at Bellows Falls was by methods identical with those still in vogue in China and British India, the great silk-producing countries of the world. The company set out very thickkly all over the land now known as the "New Terrace," a variety of mulberry trees, the leaves of which are the principal food of the silk worm. The trees varied in height from 2 to 20 feet, looking at a distance something like an orchard of apple trees of various sizes. When left to ripen, the fruit looked similar to the blackberry, only longer and without the objectional seeds.
Within a few years, a medium-sized mulberry tree of this variety was still growing and bearing fruit at [307] Alstead, N. H., and there was a splendid specimen of rather large size growing on the Saxtons River road. The leaves were plucked at particular times and fed to the worms. A large building with the siding boards on hinges, resembling a tobacco barn, stood near the brow of the present New Terrace at a point near the street leading from School Street. Here were the tables and shelves upon which the leaves were spread, and on which the worms were placed to feed. In about 31 days from the hatching of the worms, during which time they fed upon the mulberry leaves, they formed the cocoon, which took but three days. A day or two later they were carefully picked and the worms killed by boiling or steaming. The cocoons were then unwound and the threads prepared for use. In this locality the winding and spinning was largely done by the small old-fashioned flax wheel then in so common use, and there are still in town a number of articles made wholly from silk produced here.
At one time the enterprise looked so favorable that the company was offered $20,000 for its mulberry trees, upon the successful culture of which all depended, but the owners were so enthusiastic that they refused, and a year or two later a large proportion of the trees were killed by severe weather, the parties lost the amounts they had invested, and silk culture was never attempted here again. At about that time mulberry trees were set out upon a smaller scale in various parts of the town, there being a grove of them upon the land between Green and Cherry Streets. Another grove was located on the Olcott corner lot at Rockingham village near the [308] old Alexander Campbell mansion. It is not known that there was more than one place where the worms were actually reared and silk made in this town, that being on the New Terrace as stated. The town of Mansfield, Conn., at one time produced a number of hundred pounds of raw silk annually.