THE MILL

Stafford Springs, Connecticut · Since 1853

Our 4 Harness Twill is woven at the Warren Mills in Stafford Springs, Connecticut — a mill that has stood on the same site since 1853 and is one of the oldest continuously operating textile mills in the United States. It is run today under the American Woolen name, a name first built in Lawrence, Massachusetts a century and a quarter ago, lost to the collapse of New England's mill industry, and deliberately revived here in 2014.

A mill on the Willimantic, 1853

The Warren Mills were founded in Stafford Springs in 1853, on a town already known for its natural mineral springs — visitors had been traveling there to drink the iron and sulphur waters since shortly after the Revolution. By the middle of the 20th century, Warren had become America's most prominent maker of fine camel hair and cashmere woolens, one of a handful of New England mills built specifically for luxury cloth rather than volume.

The trust that built Lawrence, 1899

The name above our door has its own separate origin, seventy miles north. In 1899, Frederick Ayer and his son-in-law William M. Wood merged eight failing New England woolen mills into a single trust: the American Woolen Company. It grew into the largest woolen manufacturer in the country — sixty mills at its height in the 1920s. In 1905 the company built the Wood Mill in Lawrence, then the largest textile mill in the world, and followed it in 1909 with the Ayer Mill, whose four-faced clock tower is second in size only to Big Ben. The company's name is also tied to the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, one of the defining labor disputes of the era. Postwar competition from synthetics and the industry's shift south caught up with it, and the original American Woolen Company closed its doors in 1955.

Loro Piana takes the mill, 1988

Warren Mills, meanwhile, kept running under its own name. In 1988, the Italian luxury house Loro Piana bought the mill and invested to modernize it, describing it as on par with the finest mills in Europe. Loro Piana ran Warren for the next 26 years, and it remained the only American mill still capable of producing both fine worsted and woolen cloth.

The mill goes dark, 2013

That ended in December 2013, when Warren Corp. closed the mill and put its 86 remaining employees out of work — the last quality woolen mill left in Connecticut, and by most accounts headed for history.

Revived, and renamed, 2014

Six months later, entrepreneur Jacob Harrison Long bought the mill, with a loan and grant from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development helping cover the purchase. Rather than keep the Warren name, Long revived American Woolen — deliberately borrowing the identity of the old Lawrence trust for a mill that had never actually belonged to it. Jennifer Knight came on as president and Guy Birkhead, who had already spent thirty years at Warren, returned as vice president. The looms started turning again within weeks; the mill's first order was fabric for U.S. Navy pea coats.

How our 4 Harness Twill is made

Every hand that touches the cloth can be named — the mill that wove it, the shirtmaker who cut it, and the town each of them sits in.

Sources: americanwoolen.com (Mill History, Stafford Springs); Wikipedia, "American Woolen Company"; Journal Inquirer, Aug. 7 and Sept. 19, 2014; Hartford Courant/Sheep Industry News, "New Mill, Historic Location," May 2015.