I don't know if this sewing job included the buttonholes, but it's a lot of shirts done per day:

"We had a letter from Inda last week, she & Morty were well, she is working on a Government contract, making shirts and drawers, she has got a sewing machine & is making 10 shirts per day, she thinks she can make 16 when she gets her hand in right, they send her 10 Doz. at a time cut & numbered"

June 19, 1864 letter from Andrew Evans (father) to Samuel Evans (2nd Lt., serving near Memphis with the 59th USCT). Inda was a war widow who lived in Portsmouth, Ohio, a small town on the Ohio River.

from Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio  

--Last edited by 90thOHCoG on 2008-03-25 07:59:10 --

A period Wheeler & Wilson ad says gentlemen's shirts could be sewn by machine in 1 hour 16 minutes, which probably doesn't include cutting out. So for a pre-cut army shirt, without a bosom and some of the fancier details, it sounds like 10 to 16 in a twelve hour day, on a sewing machine, would be about right.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

I have an excerpt form a letter somewhere written by a woman who was working at the Schulkill(sp)arseal. Where all of the issue shirts were handsewn. If memory serves me correctly, she was making 12 shirts per day. I can't imagine making even half that.

While a commercial button-hole sewing machine was patented during the War (and could reputedly do 1000 button holes an hour) its cost was probably out side the reach of the contract workers.

So the "machine" she is using probably can't "d"o button holes.  And although a good expereinced person might have been able to get the machine to do button holes there is no surviving example of machine sewn button holes.

However the machine itself could do considerable more shirts than 12 shirts in a 12 hour day.  So it probably did include sewing the button holes since I can't imagine the government considering the shirts complete with out the button holes being sewn.

Remember there were at most 6 buttons on the contract shirts for a total of just 72 holes per twelve shirts.

not an insumountable number.

Not that I'm volunteering to try mind you.