A surviving bedcover can hold information that a surviving loom has lost. In the case of John Campbell, the nineteenth-century Komoka weaver, cloth preserved a pattern after the punched cards needed to reproduce it had disappeared.
The repair required someone to read the fabric as instructions—not merely admire its flowers.
Where is this place?
Komoka, Ontario — Campbell’s working community. This map locates the town or region, not a verified exact historic event site.
Working backward from the cloth
Ron Walter’s account of volunteer Hans Baer’s work, published by the National Museum of the American Coverlet in 2018, describes the recovery of Campbell’s Single Rose pattern. In January 2016, Baer photographed Campbell coverlets at the Royal Ontario Museum. He translated thread crossings into a gridded drawing, then punched replacement cards for the loom at the Ontario Science Centre.
The drawing contained 52,224 positions. Punching one card took ten to twelve minutes. Volunteers began weaving Single Rose in June 2017; the weaving was completed that August. Baer’s roughly 800 hours covered broader work, including finding card stock and drawing another pattern—not just punching Single Rose. Joining the two halves and hemming were still excluded.
The working sequence had run backward: from fabric to drawing to cards, before cards could guide the making of fabric again.
A machine still needed a trade
A Jacquard attachment uses punched cards to govern which threads are raised as a pattern is woven. National Museums Scotland explains the principle through a different surviving loom: successive rows of holes encode the design. The cards let a weaver repeat complicated patterns without inventing every movement anew. They do not turn the apparatus into a self-sufficient maker of cloth.
Campbell’s business also needed customers who did more than buy an untouched finished object. Deborah Livingston-Lowe’s 2012 thesis abstract describes their participation in work before and after weaving. Her study combined the account book, equipment and textiles rather than treating the machine alone as the history. Between 1859 and 1885, the accounts recorded orders for nearly 54,000 yards of cloth.
A University of Guelph profile of her research adds a human scale to those totals. Payments could involve cash, a chicken or labour. Farm households used a specialist’s services to obtain patterned furnishings; rural life did not mean that every family made everything independently. The profile also documented Livingston-Lowe volunteering on Campbell’s loom at the Science Centre. That is evidence of its operation in 2012, not a present-day demonstration timetable.
Back within the region
By September 2026, Fanshawe Pioneer Village in London was announcing that Campbell’s loom had joined its permanent collection. Its Textile Fair program scheduled Livingston-Lowe to discuss the Komoka weaver and his equipment. The announcement establishes a new institutional home, but it does not establish a current operating schedule or the condition of every card set.
Together, these records suggest a more demanding definition of preservation. Keeping a machine, keeping the things it made and keeping the ability to interpret them are different tasks. A collection becomes especially useful when those forms of knowledge can meet again.