WI : Silk Plantations in North America

By chance, I found the following note in the Gentleman's Magazine and London Chronicle April 1765

The French neutrals lately settled in the western parts of the province of South Carolina have already begun to apply themselves to the breeding of silk worms, in which they have made some progress; and for their greater encouragement the governor has promised 500 dollars premium to the first who shall produce 10lb weight of raw silk, the produce of Carolina.

so, they did try it.
 
By chance, I found the following note in the Gentleman's Magazine and London Chronicle April 1765



so, they did try it.
Well, yes, we know they TRIED it. But they used the native Morus rubra, AFAIK, which doesn't work. The silkworms won't thrive on it.


So. To make it work, you have to get hundreds of seeds from the right kind of Mulberry tree (which, since the whole idea in North America was to use the native trees, is unlikely to be a step they take). Note, too, that when they DID import mulberry trees to England to grow silkworms, they got the wrong kind. So, it's non-trivial getting the right kind.

Then, you plant your seeds and wait 4-10 years for them to mature. Note, that you don't even know if the correct kind of mulberry will grow in America, but you still spend lots of money hiring the right people and then sitting and waiting for a decade or so. THEN you bring over the silkworms and try feeding them the mulberry leaves and hope that they still like them, and that the soil, say, hasn't made the trees distasteful to the caterpillars.

So. It's theoretically possible, but it's a long range project. In the early days when merely surviving in the New World was significant effort, it's really hard to see anyone making the necessary and sustainede effort to succeed at this.
 
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