Textile fragment

Description

Pacific Mills, located in Lawrence, Massachusetts, manufactured this cotton fabric between 1915 and 1926. This fabric has a printed pattern consisting of a small hexagon motif which repeats in diagonal lines. An original label, which customers may have seen when encountering the product in stores, is still attached to the reverse. The detailed label, printed by the Boston-based Walker Lithograph & Publishing Company, includes two vignettes within circular frames – on the left, a woman operating a power loom, and on the right, a calico printing machine. These scenes, depicting industrial textile machinery, may have conveyed to consumers that Pacific Mills was a modern, technologically advanced company. This object is one of a large group transferred to Winterthur from the American Textile History Museum when it closed in 2017.