Grandfather's Spider Farm

THIRTY-FIVE years ago, on a farm on Lancaster Pike, about four miles from Philadelphia, my grandfather began a moneymaking industry which consisted of raising spiders and furnishing them at so much a hundred to wholesale wine merchants in this country. These merchants would stock their cellars with new, shining, freshly labeled bottles, and in three months, with the help of Grandfather’s spiders, see those same bottles veiled with filmy cobwebs. In this way the effect of years of storage was secured.

In those days it was a trifling matter to cover the bins with dust, but cobwebs — that was different! Cobwebs that draped the slender necks of the bottles like delicate lace — that was the seal of slow mellowing and fruition!

Grandfather began to show an interest in spiders when he was nine or ten years old. He discovered a ground spider and was fascinated by the movements of its many legs and the trapdoor it had fashioned for itself. Each day he went to the same spot in the garden and waited for the spider to come out.

As a youth, his interest in spiders developed to a greater degree. He wondered about the silky threads the spiders spun. With growing curiosity he watched them construct ingenious nets for the capture of their prey. He marveled at how the threads served the spiders as safeguards against falling and as a means of support from one elevated object to another. Let a member of the family destroy a spider’s web and Grandfather became furious. He would have everyone understand that spiders were his pets. Soon he began to collect and house dozens of them, setting free those that did not spin. The ‘dozens’ multiplied until Grandfather found himself feeding and caring for hundreds of spiders. That was the beginning of Grandfather’s strange, money-making industry.

Grandfather’s spider ‘farm’ grew to such proportions that it occupied several rooms of my great-grandfather’s homestead. The walls were covered with wire squares from six inches to a foot across, like the magnified sections of the wire fence used to enclose poultry yards. Behind these wire screens, the walls were covered with rough planking. There were cracks between the walls, and their surfaces were dotted with holes — all for a purpose. Long tables running the length of the rooms held wire frames, wooden boxes, and glass jars.

I was only a child, but I remember well how the wires in the room were covered over by patterns of lace drapery, in the geometrical outlines fashioned by the spider artists, inspired by the mysterious instinct which has made them weave their filmy snares in the same fashion since the world began. When the sunlight streamed through the open door, the room seemed hung with curtains of fine woven lacework. It was like a fairy palace.

Grandfather would rap his stubby pipe against the door and four or five thousand villainous-looking pets, as big as half dollars, would scamper from their retreats in the wall cracks, emerge from their crannies on the table, and cluster against the glass roofing, expecting to be fed.

It was in this room that Grandfather bred his pets. When the infants were big enough to run about, they were transferred to the next room, where they could set up for themselves.

Grandfather’s spiders were great cannibals and extremely pugnacious. They ate their children and the children ate each other. The males, smaller and more timid, were devoured by the females even at the time of impregnation. So Grandfather had to get a good price for the spiders that survived their childhood. And he did!

Grandfather’s best customer was a gentleman in Hammondstown, Now York, who produced large quantities of sparkling wines and champagne. These he bottled and labeled for the trade. The newness of the bottles and labels, however, made it obvious to careful buyers that the wines were freshly made — obvious until five hundred of Grandfather’s spiders ‘aged’ the bottles within the short period of a few months! From cork to cork delicate webs of antiquity were spun. Corners of the bins were covered with the lacework of Grandfather’s pets — all mute evidence of age. You can imagine the effect this had on the buyers.

Wine producers in Egg Harbor, Vineland, and Passaic, New Jersey, resorted to the same method of ‘aging’ new wines.

Grandfather’s spiders were welcome visitors especially in the homes of the nouveaux riches. Many private wine cellars were made to look like ancient vaults by the simple process already explained. Overhead beams, demijohns, bottles — all were covered with the interlaced threads spun by the spiders that Grandfather had raised.

To interested friends and relatives Grandfather boasted that raising spiders was a science — not a business. He was very proud of the fact that he knew good spinners when he saw them. He sought out kinds that wove themselves fine large webs of lines and circles. They were selected spiders and grand web spinners. At one time he had about 10,000 spiders, old and young.

His great-uncle in Loire sent him some eggs from France, and what he called a ‘queen’ spider. This queen spider was housed in a glass dome in a corner of the room. Beneath the dome a web of beautiful pattern stretched across nearly two feet. Grandfather had only to touch one of the meshes and the queen would dance out from her downy nest and run up the vibrating thread to his finger. Grandfather would give her a fly and she would trip back within doors with her booty.

When Grandfather died, the queen made her escape, as did hundreds of other spiders, for no one remained who knew how to care for the pets as Grandfather did. However, until the old home was demolished, spiders continued to spin their webs there — large lacy webs that would have done justice to many a wine bottle.