The Gutting of America: Why We Bought a 1960s Wool Mill

What's in this guide

• At a glance
• How it happened
• What we lost
• The mill
• American wool today
• What Made in USA means
• The closed loop
• FAQ

America used to have hundreds of wool mills. Hundreds of working mills processing American wool into American goods, employing American workers, sustaining American ranching communities from Idaho to the Carolinas.

Most of them are gone. The machinery was scrapped for metal value or shipped overseas. The knowledge went with the workers who retired and weren't replaced. The infrastructure that took generations to build was dismantled in a few decades, and today most people sleeping on a "wool pillow" have no idea whether the wool inside was ever processed on American soil.

We bought a 1960s wool mill in 2025. This is the story of why.

American wool is still being grown on American ranches, but most of it leaves the country for processing before it ever becomes a finished product.

The gutting wasn't accidental. It followed a predictable pattern: synthetic alternatives, trade policy shifts, and a relentless push for cheaper goods at any cost.

A functional wool mill from the 1960s is rarer than most people realize. The foundries that made the original cast iron parts don't exist anymore.

Vertical integration isn't just a business strategy. For us, it's the only way to control what goes into your pillow from the sheep's back to your pillowcase.

The re-industrialization of American textiles is a real and growing movement. We're part of it, and every pillow we make is a vote for it.

At a glance

A quick look at the collapse of American wool manufacturing and where The Woolshire fits into the effort to rebuild it.

Metric	Then	Now
U.S. sheep inventory (post-WWII peak)	~55-56 million head1	~5 million head2
Domestic wool processing infrastructure	Hundreds of mills across the country	A handful of working mills remaining
Federal wool support program	Active 1954-19953	Eliminated 1995
New wool mill manufacturers (globally)	American foundries producing cast iron equipment	Primarily Italy and China

Where we fit: American wool from Idaho and other western U.S. ranchers, processed on our own 1960s mill. That is the link in the chain that vanished.

How it happened

It didn't happen overnight. That's the first thing worth understanding.

The collapse of American textile manufacturing was a slow bleed across several decades, not a single event. It started with something most people don't connect to their bedding: synthetic fibers.

In the 1960s, petroleum-based textiles started becoming cheaper and more widely available. Polyester, nylon, the whole family of synthetic fill materials. Because these fibers aren't grown, they have no connection to American farmland or American ranching. Their production was industrial, chemical, and from the start, oriented toward overseas manufacturing. As synthetics gained market share, the natural fiber infrastructure that had supported American ranchers and mill workers for generations began to erode.

Then came the trade agreements. NAFTA in the 1990s opened the door to a level of global competition that American mills couldn't match. When labor costs in other countries ran thirty cents an hour versus the American equivalent, the math was simple and brutal. The only way to compete on price was to cut corners: remove regulations, exploit cheaper labor, shift production to places with little environmental oversight. A lot of American manufacturers chose not to compete on those terms. They closed instead.

The federal wool incentive program, which had supported domestic producers since 1954, was eliminated in 1995.³ That accelerated the decline of domestic flocks. The U.S. sheep inventory, which peaked near 55-56 million head after World War II, has fallen to roughly 5 million today.¹² That's not a rounding error. That's a near-total collapse of an industry.

What you're left with is a country that still grows some wool but no longer has the infrastructure to process most of it at home.

The figures on domestic flock decline are well-documented in USDA agricultural census data going back decades. The connection between the 1995 elimination of the wool incentive program and accelerated herd contraction is consistently cited in American Wool Council and academic agricultural economics literature.³

What we lost

When a mill closes, it doesn't just take jobs. It takes knowledge.

The people who ran these mills knew things that weren't written down anywhere. How to read the machinery by sound. How much wool to feed through at what speed. How to diagnose a jam before it became a problem. How to source replacement parts from a hardware store when the original manufacturer no longer existed.

That knowledge lived in the hands and ears of the people who worked there, and when those people retired without successors, the knowledge retired with them.

The machinery itself presents a separate problem. The wool mills that were common in mid-20th century America were often made from cast iron, produced by American foundries. Those foundries are mostly gone too. Today, if you want a new wool processing mill, you're looking at Italian manufacturers with long wait lists, or Chinese manufacturers of uncertain quality. There's no domestic equivalent.

This matters for a simple reason: you can't rebuild an industry you can't equip. The path back to meaningful American wool processing runs through whatever functional vintage equipment is still out there, still operable, not yet scrapped.

That's the situation we found ourselves in.

The scarcity of domestic wool processing equipment is not a fringe observation. Mountain Meadow Wool, one of the few remaining American processing mills, has written publicly about the difficulty of sourcing parts and maintaining aging equipment. The challenge is structural, not incidental.

The mill

We started The Woolshire wanting to make quality wool pillows. The original idea was simple: a cottage business, a family operation, something we could run from home while maintaining control over what went into the product. We'd been sourcing our wool batting from a mill that was still operating, still running its original 1960s equipment.

When we learned that mill might be sold, and that the most likely outcomes were scrapping for metal value or shipping the equipment overseas, we made a different decision. We bought it.

The equipment is gear and belt driven, cast iron, built the way things used to be built: for the average working man, not for a specialized technician. Everything is visible. Everything is replaceable. You don't need a diagnostic computer to understand what's happening when something goes wrong.

You can often find what you need at a hardware store. We've added some modern upgrades, like variable frequency drives, to run things more efficiently, but the bones of the machine are original and they're sound.

Nothing has broken. In the beginning, we had jams. Wool would get packed in where it shouldn't, and we'd have to stop and figure out the feed rate, the timing, the right way to work with the machine rather than against it. That took trial and error.

But the machinery itself has been reliable in a way that modern equipment often isn't, because it was designed to last and to be fixed, not replaced.

We're now running our own wool through our own mill. That means we control the entire processing chain from the moment the raw wool comes in from Idaho ranchers and others across the western U.S. through carding and batting production, through hand-finishing in northern Idaho. For a more detailed look at how that process actually works, the wool manufacturing process walks through each step.

The vertical integration piece matters for quality in ways that are hard to explain until you see it. When every step is yours, you know exactly what went into the product. There are no gaps, no handoffs to a processor you've never met, no moments where the wool is out of your hands and you have to trust someone else's standards. You either control the process or you don't, and if you don't, you're working from hope.

American wool today

There's a question we get asked a lot that I want to address directly, because it gets at something important about how people think about supply chains.

People ask whether our wool is certified organic. Whether it's GOTS certified. Whether we have third-party verification for the practices of the ranchers we work with.

Those certifications exist for a reason. The global textile trade is largely unregulated, and when you're buying cotton from India or wool from New Zealand through a supply chain with a dozen intermediaries, a third-party audit is about the only way to know what actually happened. I understand why people ask.

But when I'm standing at the Idaho Wool Growers Association talking with a rancher whose sheep are ranging on open western land, the question lands differently. Asking whether that wool is "certified organic" is a bit like standing at a farmers market stall watching someone pull vegetables out of their truck and asking for a USDA inspection report. The certification is a proxy for the transparency you already have in front of you. When you have the transparency, the proxy is less necessary.

We source our wool by knowing our ranchers. We attended the Trailing of the Sheep Festival in southern Idaho. We spoke at the Idaho Wool Growers Association. We ask about breeds, shearing practices, vegetable matter in the clip, timing of shearing relative to lambing.

We got roughly 12,000 pounds of wool from one Idaho rancher last year. That's a relationship, not a transaction. We know what we're buying because we know who we're buying from.

We specifically look for Columbia, Suffolk, and Hampshire breeds. These are coarser wool breeds, which gives the batting better loft and retention for use in pillows. The coarser fiber structure holds its shape differently than fine Merino, and for pillow fill that needs to maintain loft over years of use, that characteristic matters. For a deeper look at how wool breed and fiber structure affect sleep, why wool pillows covers the comparison in detail.

The wool question also connects to a broader health concern that drives a lot of our customers to us. Synthetic fill isn't just petroleum-derived. It shreds microplastics over time and leaches chemicals from the manufacturing process. The list of compounds involved in producing synthetic textiles is long and not fully disclosed.

Think about how we've learned, over time, that products marketed confidently as safe turned out not to be: asbestos was a widely used insulator before we understood what it did to lungs. Hydrogenated vegetable oils were marketed as healthier than animal fats for decades before the research on polyunsaturated fats caught up with the marketing. Memory foam gets described as "space age" technology, which sounds like progress. But novel materials that haven't been around long enough for longitudinal health data aren't the same thing as safe materials.

Wool has been next to human skin for thousands of years. We know what it does. For families worried about what their children are breathing in while they sleep, that history counts for something. Our fire test comparing wool pillows to memory foam and polyfill shows the difference visually, if you want to see it rather than just read about it.

Wool's natural flame resistance stems from its keratin protein structure and relatively high moisture content. It has a higher ignition temperature than cotton or most synthetic fibers and doesn't melt or drip. Wool therefore meets federal flammability standards in mattresses and bedding applications without chemical flame retardant treatment, a fact documented in CPSC and materials science literature.⁴

What Made in USA Actually Means

Here's the part most people never get told: the law behind that label is looser than it sounds.

For an unqualified "Made in USA" claim, the FTC standard is that a product has to be "all or virtually all" made here. The significant parts, the processing, and the labor all have to be domestic. That sounds strict.

The loophole is the qualified claim. A company can print "Made in USA with imported materials" and set it on the shelf right next to a product that's genuinely domestic. Most shoppers never notice the difference, and nobody is checking every pillow in the store. The burden lands on you to ask the questions most people don't know to ask.

So "American-made" pillows aren't one thing. They fall into a few tiers, and the distance between them is wider than the label lets on.

There are decorative and novelty pillows, the patriotic throw-pillow kind. Some genuinely meet the standard for domestic assembly. But they were never built to support your head for two thousand hours a year, so the label tells you nothing about what's inside.

Then there are mass-market sleep pillows assembled here. The sewing happens in the United States, which satisfies the qualified-claim rules, but the fill is usually imported polyester. The label holds up legally while the supply chain runs offshore. Where a pillow was sewn is only a small part of the answer.

The rarest tier is the one where the fiber was grown in this country, processed at a domestic mill, and filled without ever leaving. That's the hard one, and it's the part almost everyone skips, because domestic wool processing is exactly the infrastructure that got gutted. That's the part we do at our own mill.

I'll be straight with you: not every component of a finished pillow is domestic, and I'd rather say that than hide behind a label. What I can tell you is that the fill and the processing, the part that actually touches your face every night, happens at our own mill in Idaho.

The closed loop

Here's how I explain what actually happens when someone buys a Woolshire pillow.

The money doesn't go to shareholders. We don't have any. It goes back into American infrastructure. It supports the Idaho ranchers and western U.S. wool growers who produced the wool. It funds the continued operation of our mill. It goes back into our community in northern Idaho.

Everyone in the chain wants the same thing: to see American textile manufacturing come back. That's what a closed loop system looks like in practice. Every dollar that moves through it stays inside the thing it's trying to build.

There's a growing movement around this idea. People across the political spectrum are looking at what happened to American manufacturing over 60 years and concluding it was a mistake that can be corrected. We're part of that movement. Our story page goes into more detail on how we got here and what we're building.

It's worth being honest that this work is hard. American textile infrastructure is largely absent because the economics were stacked against it for decades. Rebuilding it means paying prices that reflect real labor costs and real environmental standards. It means accepting that some steps are harder to source domestically than others and working the problem rather than pretending it doesn't exist. It means doing things the slow way.

If you've read this far and you want to put something behind the idea, our wool and cotton pillow collection is where the work shows up in finished form. Every pillow that leaves our shop is part of what we're trying to prove is possible.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is American wool, and where does it come from?

American wool is wool shorn from sheep raised on American ranches. The major producing regions are the western states: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, California, and others. The U.S. sheep population is a fraction of what it was at its post-WWII peak, but American ranchers still produce wool annually, primarily from breeds like Columbia, Suffolk, Hampshire, and Merino.

The more complicated question is where that wool gets processed after shearing. Much of it leaves the country for processing in places with lower labor costs, then returns as a finished product. Truly domestic American wool means shorn, processed, and finished on American soil.

What's the difference between American-grown wool and American-processed wool?

American-grown wool means the sheep were raised and shorn in the United States. American-processed wool means the raw fiber was also cleaned, carded, and finished at domestic facilities. These are two different things, and most labeling doesn't distinguish between them.

A product can legally be marketed with American origin language while having been sent to South America or Asia for processing. At The Woolshire, we control the processing step at our own mill in northern Idaho, so we know exactly what happened to the fiber between the rancher and your pillow.

Why did American wool manufacturing decline so dramatically?

Several factors compounded over time. Synthetic fibers, which are petroleum-based and produced primarily overseas, began displacing natural fibers in the 1960s. Global trade agreements in the 1990s opened American markets to goods produced with far cheaper labor. The federal wool incentive program, which had supported domestic producers since 1954, was eliminated in 1995.

Mills that couldn't compete on price closed, the workers retired, and the knowledge and equipment largely disappeared. The U.S. sheep population fell from roughly 55-56 million head after World War II to approximately 5 million today.

What does it actually take to run a 1960s wool mill?

More patience and curiosity than specialized expertise, which sounds backwards but turns out to be true. The machinery from that era was designed for the working man, not for a trained technician. Everything is gear and belt driven, visible, and built to be repaired rather than replaced.

Parts can often be sourced from a hardware store rather than a specialty supplier. We've added modern upgrades like variable frequency drives for efficiency, but the core equipment is original and has been reliable. The learning curve for us was figuring out feed rates and timing through trial and error, not diagnosing complex mechanical failures.

Is American wool organic?

"Organic" as a label is a USDA-certified designation with specific requirements. Most American ranch wool is not USDA certified organic, but that certification was designed for global supply chains where independent verification substitutes for direct transparency. When we work with ranchers we know personally, whose practices we've seen and whose sheep range on open western land, the certification is a proxy for something we already have directly.

We look at breed, shearing practices, vegetable matter in the wool, and the overall operation. That direct knowledge is a different thing from a label, not necessarily a lesser thing.

What's wrong with synthetic pillow fill?

Synthetic fill materials are petroleum byproducts. They don't break down the way natural fibers do, and over time they shed microplastics and can leach chemicals from the manufacturing process. The concern isn't hypothetical. We've seen this pattern before with products that were widely used before their health impacts were understood.

Wool, by contrast, is a protein fiber chemically similar to human hair. It's been next to human skin for thousands of years. It meets federal flammability standards without added chemical flame retardants because of its natural fiber structure. For parents thinking about what their children are breathing in overnight, that distinction matters.

Can wool pillows help with temperature regulation during sleep?

Wool is hygroscopic, meaning it can absorb a significant amount of moisture vapor without feeling wet. This allows it to buffer the microclimate between your body and the pillow, pulling moisture away rather than trapping it. The result is a sleeping surface that tends to stay more consistent in temperature than synthetic alternatives, which trap heat because they can't move moisture. For people who sleep hot or wake up with night sweats, that physical property is worth understanding before assuming a cooling gel product is the answer.

How do you find the ranchers you work with?

Through the industry networks that still exist. We're members of the Idaho Wool Growers Association, which connects producers across the region. Events like the Trailing of the Sheep Festival in southern Idaho are where these communities still gather and where relationships form.

Social media has also opened doors: when we share what we're building, other ranchers and producers reach out. The American wool world is smaller than it once was, but it's not gone, and the people still in it tend to know each other.

What breeds of sheep produce the best wool for pillows?

For pillow fill, we use coarser wool breeds rather than fine Merino. Columbia, Suffolk, and Hampshire are the breeds we specifically look for. Coarser wool has better loft and retention, meaning it holds its shape and springiness over time in a way that matters for a pillow that needs to last years rather than months.

Fine Merino, which is excellent for clothing worn against skin, has different structural properties that make it less ideal for fill applications. Breed matters more than most people realize when it comes to how a wool product actually performs.

What does buying a Woolshire pillow actually support?

It supports the ranchers who grew the wool, the continued operation of our mill, and the broader effort to rebuild American textile infrastructure. There are no outside shareholders. The money that comes in goes back into the supply chain: into American wool sourcing, into our Idaho operation, into the ongoing work of rebuilding American wool processing. For people who want their purchasing decisions to connect to something real, our story gives the full picture of what we're building and why.

Sources

1. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Sheep and Goats, U.S. Department of Agriculture, historical series. View
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Sheep and Goats, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2024. View
3. Daniel A. Sumner and Julian M. Alston, Wool Policy in the United States, University of California Agricultural Issues Center, 1996. Covers elimination of the National Wool Act incentive program under the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996. View
4. International Wool Textile Organisation, Wool and Flame Resistance, IWTO Technical Committee, 2019. Documents wool's ignition temperature and natural flame resistance relative to synthetic fibers and its compliance pathway for bedding flammability standards. View