Wool Routes
and Wool Sites

What are Wool Routes and why map the Wool Sites of  North America?

            Since ancient times, wool routes have been essential physical pathways existing between rural areas and towns for trading wool, herding sheep, shearing, and processing wool for washing, carding, spinning, weaving and finishing. Wool routes exist because of the many steps it takes to bring raw wool to a final product. In the mountains of central Portugal near the Spanish border, there are well documented heritage 'wool routes' from the 13th century, through which sheepherders led sheep along well- trodden pathways to reach wool traders, weavers and manufacturers. The Center of Portugal has facilitated this project for tourism, and with it has installed two museums and documented over 300 factories that once existed along routes connecting the isolated mountain towns of central Portugal (“The Wool Route – Translana” 2022). The importance of these cultural heritage routes was recognised by The World Heritage Committee of UNESCO in the mid nineteen-nineties:

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            The concept of heritage routes is shown to be a rich and fertile one, offering a privileged                         framework in which mutual understanding, a plural approach to history and a culture of peace              can all operate. It is based on population movement, encounters and dialogue, cultural                           exchanges and cross-[Chara LeM1] fertilization, taking place both in space and time (“Routes                 as Part of Our Cultural Heritage.” 1994).

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            As far as we know ... sheep were brought to the North American continent for the first time by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. Sheep were later integrated into indigenous Navajo traditions in the west; they bred ancient 'Churra' sheep brought by Spanish settlers into Navajo 'Churro' sheep that adapted well to the southwestern climate. They used the wool to produce the beautiful, lustrous, strong and sturdy handspun and handwoven articles iconic to Navajo peoples today (Robson and Ekarius 2011, 282). Though only a couple sheep were smuggled into the continent by English settlers, by 1665 there were an estimated 100,000 sheep in the American colonies. When King George III made wool trade in the colonies a severely punishable act, it helped drive the colonists into the Revolutionary war against the British. During this time, many 'revolutionary' woolen mills and 'homespun' woolen practices were developed with pride and used for creating sovereignty in the colonies (“The History of Wool” 2022).

            Having grown up in the state of Maine, the presence of the old brick mills played on my imagination as the evidence of life from a different era. As many industries, and especially textile industries have become outsourced overseas, these old manufacturing buildings have become a point of attraction and fascination for photographers, historians, and urban and rural explorers alike. This topic is explored in Dr. Steven High's Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization, which combines oral history with artistic photography, giving voice to the urban and rural working class. 

            This sentiment is echoed in the book Fibershed by Rebecca Burgess, who started the Fibershed movement in southern California. It is now a non-profit organization, with the goal of creating new bio-regional and eco-conscious textile networks, and has spread in recent years to other countries, including Canada. The book explains how the textile industry adapted to liberal trade policies by favoring centralized factories in countries where the wages are low and the environmental protection standards are lax. Only a decade after the 1994 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), rural America had lost nine-hundred-thousand jobs tied to the textile sector (Burgess and White 2019, 192). However since then, a more eco-conscious rebirth of the textile industry has emerged on the NA continent. In 2013, Coastal Enterprises Inc., and the Manufacturers Association of Maine jointly did a survey that showed 8 percent of Maine’s manufacturing jobs were textile-related, and 56 percent of these companies planned to expand their businesses (Pols, 2015).  By illuminating these textile histories in Quebec, Maine and the Atlantic provinces, we will discover a vital network of wool production which continues to this day, including many wool sites, where there was significant sheep production and evidence of this in the landscape or the relevance of small to large woolen mills which were vital to rural and urban development. It may not be the ancient roads preserved as heritage routes around the world, but it is instead a vital network of wool sites, including the old old fulling and carding mills of early times which take on their on language of settler colonial heritage. The network of woolen manufacture in Maine started with a combination of spinning mills, carding and fulling stations to address the needs of the early colonists. These networks were often built along waterways using rivers for power and transportation, blending the traditional knowledge of settler and indigenous peoples (Judd et al 1996, 330-339). Later on, larger brick woolen mills were built to house each step of production in its walls and were central to the foundation of towns such Lisbon, Maine (Daggett 2006, 41-58). Today this blended heritage is evolving with the upspring of regional wool networks, climate-conscious sheep rearing and textile production. While public interest and non-profit regional associations such as Fibershed (California-based) and the Upper Canada Fibreshed (in a 400 km radius around Toronto) are articulating wool histories and potential futures for their regions, little research has been done that is oriented to Quebec, the Atlantic Provinces, and Maine. My research will bridge this gap, contributing to the revitalization for projects concerning the future of wool in this region. I start my research here, since I have lived experience of the slight differences in climate, moisture, air, altitude and temperature, as well as the complex heritages and cultural attitudes in these regions.

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