Shoddy Mill Road, the sign says.  This one’s in Glastonbury, CT., but I have seen them elsewhere in my travels around the northeast.

These are not new roads in newly developed areas, so the name obviously originated a century or more ago.

But why celebrate a shoddy mill?  And what explains the proliferation of shoddy mills?  Or maybe it isn’t the mill that was shoddy so long ago, perhaps it was the Mill Road that was shoddy?  If that’s the case, how did so many Mill Roads in the northeast get so shoddy?  Why are there no Shoddy Main Streets?  There are way more Main Streets than there are Mill Roads.   Or maybe there was a Mr. Shoddy, who owned a string of textile mills in the Northeast?

Or maybe, just maybe, shoddy didn’t mean shoddy back in the day?  Turns out that’s the answer.

The word shoddy was a noun in the early 1800s in England and was simply recycled wool; fabric made from cutting or tearing apart existing wool cloth and re-spinning the fibers.  It was cheaper than using virgin wool.

And the mills that made it? Yes, shoddy mills.

The use of shoddy grew and spread to the U.S.  Originally used as padding, the recycled fabric soon grew to be favored in clothing, because when new it looked just like the high-grade stuff.  At one point, a U.S. Government report noted that shoddy was used widely for clothing and blankets for the Army and Navy.

The use of shoddy for clothing eventually evolved the word to its modern-day meaning, however, because although the cloth looked good initially it was nowhere near as durable and lasting as virgin wool.  “Shoddy” soon became equated to inferior or poor quality in general.

By 1862 in fact, the word, by now an adjective, came to be defined as “having a delusive appearance of high quality,” in reference to the quality of governmental supplies for the armies in the Civil War.

Things do come full circle though.  At the end of Shoddy Mill Road in Glastonbury  is the 77-acre Shoddy Mill Open Space, a spectacular reuse of the ruins and land of the Crosby Manufacturing Company,  where wool waste was once recycled into dark blue woolen yarn.