Pendleton Woolen Mills is one of Oregon’s oldest and best-known manufacturers. What’s next for the brand?
There are pieces of Oregon history on movie screens this fall.
Killers of the Flower Moon, the much-anticipated Martin Scorsese epic that hit theaters at the end of October, tells the story of a series of murders committed in the Osage Nation in the 1920s after oil was found on tribal land. A New York Times story from the period describes the Osage as the richest people in the world. For the famously exacting Scorsese and his production team, showing viewers how the Osage lived before white neighbors conspired to strip them of their wealth meant learning everything they possibly could about how they lived at that moment in time.
“They got everything right, including the food that [the Osage] ate, the china that they liked,” Barry Friedman tells Oregon Business, noting a scene in which characters are eating grape dumplings off Spode china, which was extremely popular in the Osage Nation in those years. “They really did their homework.”
Part of that homework involved a call to Friedman himself. He’s the author of two books on Native American trade blankets — Chasing Rainbows and Still Chasing Rainbows — and he likely owns the largest collection of trade blankets in the world. The film’s producers reached out to Friedman both for consultation on which types of blankets would have been most popular with the 1920s Osage and to source vintage blankets themselves.
In all he sold 60 blankets for the production. Producers also reached out to Pendleton Woolen Mills to recreate a blanket popular during the period — the archival Serape blanket — down to even re-creating labels that were in use during that point in the company’s history but which have long since been discontinued.
And in addition to the Serape, the film includes dozens of Pendleton blankets from Friedman’s collection.
It’s not the first time Pendleton products have made a splash in popular culture. The company’s downtown headquarters includes a small museum dedicated to the history of the brand, including stills from the 1998 Coen Brothers cult classic The Big Lebowski, for which actor Jeff Bridges largely dressed himself (though he has said the Pendleton cardigan he wore in the film was provided by the costume department — but he kept it after the production ended). And in the 1960s, a fledgling rock band called itself the Pendletones in homage to the wool shirts that were popular among surfers who needed to stay warm on chilly mornings and evenings coming to and from the beach. The band quickly rebranded as the Beach Boys, but the shirts they wore in early publicity photos are still produced by the company.
Pendleton isn’t Oregon’s largest manufacturer, but it might be the best-known Oregon brand. It’s been in business as Pendleton Woolen Mills for 114 years and is run by a family that, this year, celebrates 160 years of weaving wool in Oregon.
“We’re not owned by venture capitalists, where you swing for the fences, and if you get a homer, great, and if you strike out, too bad. We’re not trying to be a tenbagger,” says CEO John Bishop, referring to an investment that returns 10 times its purchase price. “We’re just trying to grow our business profitably over time.”
The early history of Pendleton Woolen Mills is really two histories. First, there is the story of the Bishop family’s involvement in the textile industry. John Bishop’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas Kay, emigrated to Oregon in 1863 from England, where he’d worked in mills.
As Bishop tells it, Kay “bounced around” the Willamette Valley working in various mills — many of which were profitable but short-lived because they were subject to fire — before finally opening his own, the Thomas Kay Woolen Mill in Salem, in 1889.
After he died in 1900, Kay’s daughter Fannie — and her husband C.P. Bishop, who owned a clothing store in Salem — took the reins of the company.
Then there is the history of the Pendleton Woolen Mill, which opened in 1896 in the town of the same name, with funding from local financiers. That mill shuttered in 1907 amid a financial panic, but civic leaders campaigned to reopen it. That was partly because they were worried about jobs leaving the area but also because it made sense to weave wool in the area, where so much raw wool was being produced. According to Bobbie Conner, executive director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, there are “far more sheep than cows, more sheep than people,” in Eastern Oregon — as many as 3 million.
According to Friedman, the original Pendleton mill started out scouring and cleaning raw wool but, by the end of the 19th century, decided to start making blankets to sell to Native Americans at trading posts.
Conner dates the advent of trading posts — and the wool trade blanket — in the Northwest to the early 19th century, when fur traders with the Hudson Bay Company started exploring the interior Northwest.
“The trading post represented an important change in technology. One of those changes was a fabric, because we wore buckskin, smoked hides, brain-tanned hides, rawhide in our outerwear, as well,” says Conner, who is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla and whose ancestry is Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce. But “there was something very, very important” for tribes in wool trade blankets, she says, because they were durable and colorful. “We have a 200-year relationship with wool.”
According to Friedman, in 1890 the U.S. government licensed traders to set up businesses on reservations — “sort of like a convenience store” — to trade food products like sugar and coffee as well as durable goods and tobacco, and Native people would purchase products with whatever they had available to trade. That included blankets, which Indigenous people wore as robes or shawls.
During the late 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century, there were numerous American companies that made blankets specifically to be sold at trading posts. But Pendleton was the only one that specifically went into business for that purpose. That continued after the Bishop family took over — and well after most other trade-blanket manufacturers went under in the 1930s.
Three years after the Bishop family purchased the Pendleton mill, they purchased another woolen mill in downtown Washougal, Wash. Both are still operational, with the Washougal mill employing 235 people and the Pendleton mill employing 60. Over the past century, the company has opened and closed other mills — operating one in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood in the 19th century and other plants in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and California at other times. Its product line has also shifted: The company expanded into apparel in the 1920s, making men’s shirts and, starting in the 1940s, women’s clothing. (The latter mostly focused on women’s formal wear — suits made of skirts and blazers — and was sunset in the 1970s.)
The Washougal plant and the Pendleton plant have different types of looms and so focus on different products. Workers at the Washougal site operate dobby looms — a simpler style of loom that can only do simple, linear patterns, like stripes or plaids. The Pendleton plant has Jacquard looms, which can handle more complex patterns, including the angular and triangular designs associated with the company’s trade blankets, as well as more freeform Dale Chihuly patterns.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were hundreds of textile mills in the United States; some estimates say there were at least 1,000 textile mills alone. Official estimates of the number of remaining woolen mills vary, but most say the number can be counted on one hand. A nonprofit called Fibershed found dozens of mills producing some amount of fabric in the U.S. but just three companies milling wool at a large scale domestically. While official estimates vary, the company has not been immune to changes that have upset manufacturing, particularly in the clothing industry, in recent decades. According to Bishop, until the 1990s, Pendleton shirts were not just woven but cut and sewn at domestic factories in Oregon and the Midwest, all of which have closed. While blankets are milled, hemmed and packaged at the domestic mills, fabric for shirts is milled in Washougal but exported to Mexico for cutting and sewing, Bishop says.
And only about 50% of Pendleton’s product line is actually made from the fabrics the company makes in its mills. The rest — including pet beds (which are made of acrylic fleece but feature Pendleton designs) and knitwear — are made from other materials and are manufactured outside the United States.
But about 30% of the wool the company uses is still sourced from Oregon ranches, says Daniel Gutzman, Pendleton Woolen Mills’ wool buyer, with another 15% or so coming from other western states, like Idaho, Utah and California. The company also sources wool from Australia and New Zealand, because wool is a seasonal product, with shearing happening in the spring — so sourcing from the southern hemisphere means a consistent supply.
Another notable shift in Pendleton’s business model, Bishop says, has been its distribution strategy. In the middle of the 20th century, Pendleton had a few of its own retail stores but primarily sold to department stores and other retailers. In the ’80s and ’90s, department stores began to consolidate and became more powerful. It became, as Bishop puts it, more difficult to do business with them. So in the mid-1990s, Pendleton started a website and then a print catalog. And shifting to direct-to-consumer marketing has meant shifting to a more coherent brand identity, Bishop says.
“Previously, our home business, our men’s business and our women’s business were really separate entities and we managed them differently,” Bishop says. “We had different sales forces, we had different advertising agencies, we were really expressing the brand quite differently across those three product categories. But when you’re selling it all in the same store, or on the same website, or in the same catalog, you really need to make a coherent message across the categories. So in the last 15 years, we’ve really made a concerted effort to express the brand in a way that’s uniform.”
Still, once something is released into the world, there’s little predicting what it will mean to customers and other members of the public. Bishop says the first time he saw The Big Lebowski, he thought, “Oh, there’s our sweater. That’s cool.” But he had no clue that the film would become a “really big deal,” spawning events and conventions — many of which attract attendees dressed like the characters, causing a resurgence of sweater sales.
For Conner, the relationship to Pendleton Woolen Mills is personal, dating back to when she worked at Hamley Western Store & Saddle Shop in downtown Pendleton as a teenager, from the pillows an aunt sent her made from fabric scraps of Pendleton products to seeing Umatilla chiefs at the Pendleton Round-Up in the fall — whose regalia includes Pendleton saddle blankets.
“I feel kind of funny, like I live and breathe it every day,” Conner says.
Conner notes that the Pendleton-based mill that lends the company its name is on the edge of the Umatilla reservation, and her ancestors were among the first customers of its blankets.
The company donates a portion of sales to a number of nonprofits, most of which serve Native American communities.They include the American Indian College Fund; the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center; and, more recently, the First Nations Development Institute, which supports preservation of Indigenous languages, and the Northwest Native American Center of Excellence at Oregon Health & Science University, developed to increase the number of Native Americans in the health care workforce.
Those partnerships date back 20 years, when David Kennedy — the co-founder of Portland ad industry Wieden+Kennedy, who was on the board of the American Indian College Fund — suggested Pendleton partner with the organization on commissioned blankets. That model eventually shifted to one where Pendleton makes a donation above and beyond royalties, but the partnership continues.
And the relationship with Native communities is, of course, older. In recent years some writers have raised the question about whether Pendleton’s designs are an example of cultural appropriation — particularly as Pendleton has taken on the sheen of a luxury brand rather than the maker of stylish but practical blankets and clothing. (Friedman notes that Pendleton’s products have never been cheap: In the 1920s a Pendleton blanket would have cost $8 or $9, the equivalent of $120 to $130 in 2023 dollars.)
But even Pendleton’s harshest critics note that it’s a complicated issue. The original blanket designs — including the Chief Joseph blanket and the Harding blanket, which Friedman says are the company’s longest-running designs — include geometric patterns that have long been linked with Native culture, particularly with the aesthetics of Southwest tribes.
Conner says it’s likely some of the early designs were created by Pendleton employees, who traveled Indian country not only merchandising and marketing but gathering inspiration for blanket designs from Indian country without any consideration or compensation for the appropriation of those designs. And while that is a long-ago past practice, it is one of the things that comes into the equation about cultural appropriation and intellectual property today.
In more recent decades, Pendleton has begun working directly with Native artists.
And in addition to making donations to nonprofits, Conner says, Pendleton partners with Native communities in other ways. When Tamastslikt Cultural Institute opened in 1998, she says, Pendleton resurrected a design named Cayuse from its archives, to be sold in the museum’s store — and gifted the new blankets, along with matching pillows, to those who helped make the museum happen.
When Friedman spoke with OB, Killers of the Flower Moon had not yet been released, but he’d seen stills from the movie, including one in which lead actress Lily Gladstone is wearing a Pendleton shawl from the 1920s — one he recognized from his own collection.
“I had owned that blanket for 35 or 40 years. It’s a really simple, very plain-
looking blanket, but it was in perfect condition. I just thought it was elegant in its simplicity,” he says. “I didn’t instruct [the costume designers] that this should be the blanket she wears — they sort of picked it and they picked exactly the one I would have picked, so I love that.”
Friedman says interest in his blanket collection — which he began in 1969 and which he says kept him sane during decades working as a comedy writer for the likes of Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis and Johnny Carson — had already picked up in advance of the movie’s release, and he expects that Pendleton’s sales will as well.
Even without attention from Hollywood, Pendleton is planning for the future. While Bishop is mum on the company’s succession plan — “I’d like to say it was a closely guarded secret, but I don’t exactly know” — he notes that several other family members work for the company, including his son and his first cousin’s daughter.
The company has every intention of continuing to manufacture in the United States, and when OB visited the Washougal plant in September, it had just installed new yarn-making equipment imported from Italy expected to improve the energy efficiency of the mill, and that should last at least 20 to 25 more years, Bishop says.
“The future is going to be a continuation of the past,” he says.
“I’ve always been proud of the fact that Pendleton is an Oregon company, and it has stayed in Oregon,” Conner says. “Come to any gathering on the Umatilla reservation — or any others — and you will see plenty of Pendleton products on display on the backs of our people or in the regalia of our people.”
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