I noticed at some point that a bunch of my 1910s patterns, when they had advertising on the envelopes, had advertising for something called "Danish poplar cloth". Google was almost no help with this because it turns out that the Shakers made something they called "poplar cloth" out of woven strips of wood and used it to make their famous baskets and boxes, and most of the references I found on the Internet were to that.
A swing through the various newspaper archives sites brought up a load of ads, mostly from the late 1900s (the decade, that is) to about 1920. These are from 1911 to 1919:
But what was it?
The ads say that it was a cotton-wool blend suitable for school clothes and other day wear but don't tell us anything about the weight, weave, thread count, etc. I even looked in the old dictionary at work but, nope--not under D or P:
So I did what any desperate eccentric would do, got online . . .
. . . and ordered the only bolt of it I could find.
Because I was curious.
Not kidding.
I am now the owner of 16 yards of hundred-year-old fabric.
It says so right on the bolt:
It was produced by the Hamilton Woolen Company in Soutbridge, Massachusetts. Hamilton operated from 1831 to 1934; their 1836 building is still standing.
If I'm honest, it's sort of anticlimactic. It's a plain weave and very open. The weight and feel are most like dress-weight linen or homespun-style cotton, except that since it's wool it's harder and itchy. Very itchy.
I slightly wonder if it fell out of favor when undergarments became smaller in the 1920s and you were in danger of your outerwear actually touching your skin. I do love wool but either this was as inexpensive as it seems to have been or the lanolin is so long gone that it's not getting fair representation here.
This bolt is showing its age; I don't think it was ever unwrapped but it's faded and there is some edge wear and some runs.
. . . so that's it. That's the ubiquitous Danish poplar cloth. I still have no idea why it was called poplar cloth or where the "Danish" came from--I got some hints that "Danish" was added later but no idea why. I'm going to look for a few more antique dictionaries to see if I can figure that out.
