Pendleton Wool History & Heritage

Thomas Lister Kay grew up in Yorkshire mills — bobbin boy first, then weaver — before training on the American East Coast. In 1863 he took the long way west: Atlantic ship, burro across the Isthmus of Panama, Pacific up the coast. Oregon had sheep, clean water, and room for a man who knew wool. He helped organize early mills, then opened his own in Salem in 1889. Pendleton still counts that arrival as year one.

Kay’s daughter Fannie learned the floor and the books beside him. In 1876 she married C.P. Bishop, a Salem clothier — mill craft on one side, retail on the other. Their sons Clarence, Roy, and Chauncey trained at the Philadelphia Textile School. In 1909 the town of Pendleton put up a $30,000 bond and the Bishops matched it, rebuilt an idle scouring mill, and hung the family name on the building. First product out of finishing that September: Jacquard trade blankets.

The first customers were the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla — neighbors on the Columbia Plateau who already knew what a good trade blanket was worth. Joe Rawnsley, a Jacquard hand who’d learned the loom at the Philadelphia Textile School, spent time with Native communities to get color and pattern right, then cut those preferences into the machine. Square corners replaced the old round ones. In 1916 Pendleton wove the Glacier National Park blanket for Great Northern’s park stores — candy stripes at each end, the first in a National Park line that still runs.

In 1912 the Bishops bought a second mill in Washougal, Washington — lighter cloth, suitings, room to grow beyond blankets. Headquarters moved to Portland in 1919. Clarence Morton Bishop wanted something the drab work shirt market didn’t have: virgin wool in real color and plaid. In 1924 the Pendleton shirt landed. Ranchers, loggers, and sportsmen took it first. By 1929 the company ran a full men’s sportswear line off the same Pacific Northwest looms.

World War II put most of the looms on military blankets and uniform cloth. After the war, Pendleton opened a women’s line — the ’49er jacket in 1949 became the postwar hit. In 1961 a California band called themselves the Pendletones after the plaid wool shirt surfers wore on cold beach mornings. They changed the name to the Beach Boys. The shirt kept the nickname anyway.

Six generations of the Bishop family still run Pendleton — same Oregon and Washougal mills, virgin wool dyed, spun, and woven in-house, still “Warranted To Be A Pendleton.” Blankets for home and ceremony. Shirts that break in instead of wearing out. We carry the line at Moon Ridge in Fayetteville. Come feel the wool in person, or shop it online and we’ll ship it to your door.