Churchill Weavers Fabric Archive at the Kentucky Historical Society

H-Kentucky Churchill Weavers Fabric Archive at the Kentucky Historical Society

Blog Post published by Randolph Hollingsworth on Monday, November 4, 2013

The Churchill Weavers collection of an estimated 40,000 textiles at the Kentucky Historical Society is one of the most significant fabric archives in the Appalachian region. For 85 years, Churchill Weavers produced distinctive hand-woven clothing and home textiles in Berea, Kentucky. The company offered through online and retail stores a variety of items: scarves, ponchos, handbags, neckties and handkerchiefs, tablecloths, swingwraps, fandangles, flings, ruanas, chenilles, and boucles. From its beginnings in Berea in 1922, the Churchill Weavers were nationally recognized and sold in large department stores throughout the U.S. as well as in luxury items shops.

Founded by David Carroll and Eleanor Franzen Churchill, the manufacturing center was inspired by India's handweaving tradition. As missionaries in India, they had both established schools for boys that emphasized vocational training. Mr. Churchill had redesigned the fly-shuttle loom which won a first place medal at the Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition of the India National Congress in Bombay in 1904. He continued to re-design and build hand looms to help impoverished people compete with the British colonials' power looms.

Citation: Randolph Hollingsworth. Churchill Weavers Fabric Archive at the Kentucky Historical Society. H-Kentucky. 09-11-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2289/blog/kentuckys-cultural-ambassadors-world/3190/churchill-weavers-fabric-archive Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Kentucky

When they settled in Berea in the 1920s, Mr. Churchill designed new devices to minimize stress on the worker while maximizing output in the many different steps of the weaving process. Within twenty-five years the business expanded to a workforce of 150 people. The looms in Berea were engineered and built by Mr. Church, while Mrs. Churchill designed and marketed the handwoven materials in New York and Chicago.

In the early part of the twentieth century many weaving centers had started in remote places in the Appalachian Mountains as a way to help women earn money. The other weaving centers criticized Churchill’s fly-shuttle weaving, claiming that the speed of weaving sacrificed control. At Berea College, the weaving center faculty felt that their products were truly "handwoven" and that the Churchil fly-shuttle looms were hurting the market for the Berea College students' output. In 1926, Anna Ernberg, the Director of Berea College's Fireside Industries wrote to the college president: "We are both weaving the kind of scarfs or shawls that women wear these days. On the Churchill looms a girl can make 40 to 50 in a day and she is paid ten cents apiece. One of our girls can make no more than one in two hours and it is only after a good deal of training that she can do it nice and evenly. She is paid 14 cents to 15 cents per hour. Their scarfs are, as a rule, more scanty than ours, but they sell them at as good a price as we ask and claim them to be handwoven.” The Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, an organization founded to promote and market mountain crafts, originally refused membership to Churchill Weavers. Meanwhile the Churchill Weavers joined the Tennessee Valley Authority's Southern Highlanders, which shared many of the same members and worked on joint promotional activities. By the 1950s, Churchill Weavers was allowed in to the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, and while there were still disagreements about prices for their goods, they basically competed within a comparable price range.

The original hand-looms continued to be used long after Mr. Churchill's death in 1968. In 1973 Mrs. Churchill sold the company to Richard and Lila Bellando. By 1996, Crown Crafts, Inc. acquired Churchill Weavers and operated the business as an independent division until it closed in 2007. Unable to compete against low-price importants, Crown Crafts CEO E. Randall Chestnut tried to sell the carriage-trade throw producer to Bedford Cottage, LLC based in New Hampshire, but the deal fell through. Ultimately, Crown Crafts sold the Churchill Weavers name, intellectual property rights, yarn inventory, looms and other equipment to Wilford Morris, owner of Walcot Weavers of Lafayette, Indiana.

Co-founder Eleanor Churchill had kept samples from each design in cardboard boxes in the basement of her warehouse, categorizing and labeling each item for posterity. Few other textile collections represent such a long span of time (1922-2007) from one company's output.

Faced with foreign competition and downsizing, the business was auctioned in 2007. Soon after, the KHS Foundation purchased the Churchill Weavers Collection, which includes thousands of fabric samples, tools, looms, photographs and business records. Nearly every textile created by Churchill Weavers has a sample in the fabric archive, documenting every pattern, weave nuance, color, fiber and material in their products. However, much of the collection is in dire need of repair as the KHS staff works to re-house each item for preservation and storage. See more on this from the report by Abbigail Uhl, KHS intern in the Summer of 2013, "The Importance of Preserving Textiles."

Additional Readings:

Alvic, Philis. "Churchill Weavers 80 Years of American Handweaving" (2004). Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. Paper 428. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/428

"Churchill Weavers" (2012). 50 Built. http://www.50built.com/churchill-weavers. [an interview with Heather Powers, a designer who worked for Churchill Weavers]

Posted in: Kentucky's Cultural Ambassadors to the World