Faribault Woolen Mill: Warmth Through Every American War

On the banks of the Cannon River in Faribault, Minnesota, one of the oldest textile mills in the country is still running, still making the same thing it has made for more than one hundred sixty years: wool blankets.

Carl Klemer was a German-born cabinetmaker who arrived in southern Minnesota just as the Civil War was ending. In eighteen sixty-five he started a small carding factory, turning local fleece into wool batting. It was a one-man operation in a river-powered building no bigger than a barn. But Klemer was methodical. Over the next two decades he expanded the mill into a full woolen operation, producing cloth, flannel, and the heavy blankets that pioneers loaded onto wagons heading west.

By the early nineteen hundreds, Faribault Woolen Mill had found its defining role: the United States government needed blankets, and the mill could make them in quantity. During the First World War, the Army awarded a contract for one hundred thousand blankets. The mill's looms ran around the clock. When the Second World War came, the government returned. With most of the male workforce drafted into service, the women of Faribault stepped onto the factory floor and kept production going, turning out more than two hundred thousand blankets and sleeping bags for soldiers fighting in Europe and the Pacific.

The mill closed briefly in two thousand nine, a casualty of the financial crisis and cheap overseas imports. But it reopened in two thousand eleven, rebuilt by new owners determined to keep American wool manufacturing alive in the same building where it had always lived. Today the Faribault mill still weaves blankets on antique Jacquard looms, still sources American wool, and still supplies the military.

Through the Civil War, the frontier, two world wars, and a near-death in the twenty-first century, this mill on the Cannon River has kept running. Not many American factories can say the same.