Thomas Kay's Mill and the Fabric of Oregon
Near Salem, Oregon
Mill Creek runs along the eastern edge of downtown Salem, and for more than seventy years it powered one of Oregon's most important industries. In eighteen eighty-nine, an English immigrant named Thomas Lister Kay built a woolen mill here beside the creek. Kay had grown up in the textile trade in Yorkshire and had worked in American woolen mills since the eighteen sixties. He understood the Willamette Valley's potential: abundant wool from the region's sheep ranches, reliable water power from Mill Creek, and a market hungry for finished fabric.
The original wooden mill burned in eighteen ninety-five, and Kay rebuilt in brick, opening the new mill in eighteen ninety-six. That building, a substantial red-brick structure on Mill Street, still stands today as part of the Willamette Heritage Center. The Thomas Kay Woolen Mill is the only surviving water-powered textile factory in Oregon. Its mill race, a diverted channel from the creek, once turned machinery that transformed raw fleece into blankets, flannels, and cloth distributed throughout the American West.
Thomas Kay's descendants went on to found Pendleton Woolen Mills, the company still famous today for its blankets and wool shirts. Four generations of the Kay family managed this Salem mill from eighteen eighty-nine until it finally closed in nineteen sixty-two. When you stand near the old brick building on Mill Street, you are standing at the origin point of a family enterprise that shaped how the West dressed for a century.
