Johnson Woolen Mills: Never Out of Style
Employees At 150-year-Old Business Find Steady Market For Hunters' Jackets, Pants
By Roy Bongartz
In an age when fashions change overnight and markets vanish almost as fast, it's something of a miracle that Johnson Woolen Mills has survived nearly 150 years by rarely changing its products.
Located in the village of Johnson, just north of Stowe, the clothing company still makes the same woolen shirts, jackets and the famous iceman's pants that have been best sellers now for nearly 50 years.
The heavy, 28-ounce forest green pants were named for the men who wore them while cutting blocks of ice from frozen ponds and lakes. In spite of the fact that ice cutters no longer ply their trade on those frozen expanses, the Johnson mill is still selling plenty of the forest-thick, warm pants - and much more old-fashioned woolen cold-weather gear as well.
The mill's early owners catered to fishermen working in winter camps in sub-zero temperatures. Today's management sells its product to cross-country skiers, to hunters, to ice fishermen, to winter runners, to a new generation of sports-minded people who refuse to stay in the house in bad weather. Although the character of the customer has changed, the pants and heavy coats and shirts and jackets are still pretty much the same as they have been for a century and a half.
Photos by Sandy Macys
Begun in Johnson
Vermont native Delmer R. Barrows, 56, vice president and general manager, is the third-generation owner of the mill, bought by his grandfather Delmer A. Barrows, and run by his father Robert Barrows until his recent retirement. The mill had its beginnings as one of many making fabrics from the wool of local seep. The clapboards of the old mill (now the store) are painted to read: "Founded 1842," but it is believed a man named Dow was already running the mill in the 1830's.
Because the Johnson mill goes along from year to year always selling the same things, it has some distinct advantages over other companies.
Explains Barrows, "We're so small that we can sell our entire production without having to change the line. We don't have to 'style' the line as they do in the fashion world."
As for the actual size of the company, Barrows does not reveal sales figures, but says he employs 48 people year around and has never had to close down sine the 1927 flood. Additional staff has, in fact, been added for Johnson's large, new manufacturing facility, which was completed in August of 1985.
Assistant manager Mort Lord long had a desire to get into a small business. He was with the national brokerage firm E. F. Hutton, in Burlington, when he joined the mill ten years ago.
"We do one thing one minute and something else the next - it's a stimulating environment," Lord says. Like Barrows, he too feels the company's traditional line of clothes are its mainstay, its fame solidly based on those iceman's pants and hunters' jackets.
The company's traditions have been slow to change in other areas as well. Up to 1951, the mill was still using power from a water wheel turned by the force of the Gihon River that runs past the shop buildings; it has since been adapted to run electric generators. Before that it provided direct power to turn belt-driven looms and spindles. The dam is broken and, Barrows says the wheel was taken away by "some New York flatlanders living in Waitsfield."
Photos by Sandy Macys
Traditional Tailoring
The company's manufacturing now goes on in a spanking new frame building. Here workers do the cutting, sewing, piecing, "serging," and finishing of traditionally patterned checked and plaid hunting clothes, all made of material that is 80 to 85 percent wool.
A factory outlet in the older building next door displays all these freshly made winter garments in a welcoming atmosphere of deep reds and greens that stand out against pine boarded walls and polished floors.
On the 'production line' in the new building, a garment starts at one end of a bright, cheerful-feeling room the length of a football field, and is passed up the line of workers, each at a work table specializing in a single tailoring operation.
Pieces are first cut from patterns on an amazing, bowling-alley-like cutting table over 50 feet long, made of maple and birch flooring. General Manager Barrows says "We put it in before the building was completed, built it right in place." Otherwise it would never have fit through the doorway.
"We have our own way of cutting and sewing garments. A lot of people would like to know exactly how we do it. You have to be careful in this business, because people are always copying you, or even using your name falsely - we do have a problem sometimes, with people who are not our dealers, but try to capitalize on the Johnson name, bootleg the stuff."
In the production line, one woman lines collars for jackets; here a worker places waist bands on pants; there another stitches serging on the cut-off edge of material to prevent it from raveling - a fine-stitching process that binds a border to keep it from fraying or curling, A stack of zippered trouser flies are serged so they will fit smoothly into those heavy wool iceman's pants.
Photos by Sandy Macys
It takes about a week from the time the cloth for those pants is cut from huge 40-foot bolts of wool to the moment the Johnson tag is sewn in. Stacks of bright green and red collars, cuffs and sleeves are ready to be sewn together for Johnson jackets. Well-worn cardboard patterns hang on the wall, used for the cutting of the traditional clothing made here. Some of them are 50 years old, and the styles they represent go back a century and a half to the days when the mill was first established, using water power here on the bank of the Gihon River.
With true Yankee frugality and good business sense, nothing is wasted at the mill. From the discarded ends of material, mittens can be made, some by cottage-industry workers who freelance for the mill from their homes. Other scraps are bagged and sent off to a specialized factory to be ground up and recycled, still others end up in wool rugs.
One of the few changes in Johnson's wool has been addition of some nylon for added strength, and the fact that the wool isn't locally produced.
"The Vermont Wool Growers Association sell their wool in a pool, and though it goes mainly to mills in the East, it goes also to mills elsewhere in the country, and wool comes in from other places. It is not possible to say exactly where any given wool comes from."
Century-Old Patterns
Many of the plaids and patterns have been traditional with the company for at least a century. A small checked-shirting pattern is popular - an old pattern, black with red, or with green, or with blue. Some 14 different original plaids are in current production.
One little-known but much appreciated specialty were the lift blankets used at Mt. Mansfield ski area since the 1940s and recently discontinued. With faster lifts being installed, the old blankets will no longer be needed - it took six attendants to handle them, but many a skier can recall their warmth, from the outside shell of whipcord over 14-ounce wool shirting.
Among favorite textile patterns for various garments is a copyrighted plaid the firm bought from J. O. Ballard Co., a mill in Malone, N.Y., that went out of business 20 years ago. In this way famous old favorites can be kept alive and in production.
Says Barrows: "We have been using that fabric since depression days. We kept open through the depression; we cut production, but we kept open and never showed a loss. Earlier, we were ravaged by the 1927 flood; we were closed for six weeks when the Gihon River overflowed its banks, and the water rose over our looms, our cards, our spinning machines; they had to be dismantled and the dirt cleaned out, a tremendous undertaking.
One change Johnson has made is cutting back on the thickness of some of its garments, Barrows says.
"Some of the pants we used to make we don't make don't make any more because they were so heavy; today instead of the heaviest pants people wear insulated underwear with somewhat lighter-weight outer pants. The heaviest pants we make today are in a 28-ounce weight fabric.
Photos by Sandy Macys
400 Retail Outlets
Although the firm supplies such big names as L.L. Bean and J.C. Penney, there are numerous small outlets among Johnson's 400 retail outlets. Lord says, "Because we are also small we can do some things the bigger companies can't. We like our 'mom and pop' accounts. We have some dealers who purchase only a few hundred dollars' worth of clothing a year."
Besides opening the new manufacturing facility two years ago, the main innovation at the mills has been the addition of a ladies' wool jacket similar to a man's but made up in softer colors - light blues and violets.
"It was a shocker for some of our customers, used to our traditional hunting patterns," says Lord. "It was designed for women - it's not a hunting coat and it's not a work coat." That design was done professionally, although, Lord says, "We do a great deal of design work right here in the plant."
Barrows says the firm is too small to set any trends, but can benefit from them. "The big boys" - Woolrich, the Milton Company, Commander - affect public demand, which can rise and fall unpredictably. "If Ralph Lauren is seen in a red plaid shirt - as he was - we sell a lot of red plaid shirts," he says.
Most of the business is brought in by four salesmen reaching retail dealers, most of them concentrated in New England and New York, with some in the upper Midwest and even Alaska.
With a limited production capacity, Johnson Mills does not illustrate its mail-order brochure since a regular catalog would actually bring too much demand. "We are a sort of mini L.L. Bean," he says - "very mini."
Favorite Johnson items include as the double cape wool jac-shirt, and of course those famous pants. Although spruce green is the traditional favorite in iceman's pants, they also come in navy blue, charcoal, reverse whipcord and the Malone plaid. Also offered are blazers, kilts, pea jackets, chamois shirts, and wool sweaters, scarves, mittens, hats, ties and socks.
Barrows Family Ties
Barrows has been in the business since his youth, beginning with his father after graduation from American University in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s. "We're native Vermonters; we go back to the 1790s," he says. "The family came over from England and settled in Irasburg, Vt. My great-grandfather became a retailer, and he owned a store in Woodsville, N.H."
The famous Hetty Green was a tenant of this grandfather - she lived over his store early in her career, before she moved to Massachusetts and became the world's greatest financier, amassing a fortune of $100 million. Barrows recalls, "He had tales to tell about how frugal she was."
About 1905 this grandfather bought a half interest in the Johnson mill from its owner I. L. Pearl, and in 1907 he bought Pearl out altogether, and changed the name to Johnson Woolen Mills.
Another family member on hand is Barrows' sister Vicki Maitre, who has done clerical work here for 10 years but says she's really been in the plant "since I was in diapers."
When office duties permit she can be found behind a counter in the store, where the rush of business comes with tourist time in the fall. Some skiers do come, in the winter, but just when it is too cold to be on the slopes.
Barrows shows a photograph tken when he was a young man of 23, holding his young son, with his father and grandfather - four generations of Barrows, three generations of the Johnson Woolen Mills. There is some doubt as to whether there will be more Barrows in the future of the mill. Barrows' son, Jeffrey, is now occupied in running The Town Restaurant in the center of the village; a daughter lives and works in Stowe. "I'm still hoping we can get them in here, but I’m not sure," says Barrows.
As he looks to the future of the mill with some uncertainty, he seems to regret certain changes in workers' attitudes, although employees do tend to stay on at the mill, even now, for long periods of their lives. Barrows says, "One forelady stayed with the plant for 50 years, and we still have one lady who came to work in 1944, and another who began in the early 50s.
-- The Sunday Rutland Herald and The Sunday Times Argus,
November 29, 1987
