Day 94: Today's Pick — Faribault Mill Wool Blanket

Faribault Mill almost died.

In 2009, a 144-year-old wool mill in Faribault, Minnesota — a town of about 23,000 people, an hour south of Minneapolis — went dark. The company that owned it had run it into the ground. The looms stopped. The dye houses cooled. The mill, which had survived the Civil War, two world wars, every major recession of the 20th century, and the relentless offshoring of American textile manufacturing, was put up for auction with the intention of being parted out and sold for scrap.

A pair of investors — Paul Mooty and Chuck Mooty — bought the whole thing in 2011 and turned it back on. They had to coax retired weavers out of their gardens to come back and run the looms, because nobody else in America still knew how. They restored the building. They retooled the dye house. They started, slowly, making blankets again.

This is, on one hand, a business story. On the other hand, it is the reason that you and I can, today, in 2025, buy a real American-woven wool blanket from a real American mill that was inches from being a museum.

The blankets are good.

I have, for what it's worth, two of them. A heavy gray-and-cream "Trapper Point" throw, which is the modern version of the Hudson's Bay-style striped point blanket, and a forest-green Pure & Simple twin-bed-sized blanket that lives at the foot of my bed in the winter. Both are roughly twice as heavy as anything I have ever owned from a non-mill blanket source. Both have a dry, almost slightly springy hand to them — wool, when it is woven the way Faribault weaves it, does not have the prickly itch of cheap wool or the slightly plastic feel of recent wool blends. It feels like a piece of furniture. The fringes are tied by hand. The bindings are stitched cleanly. The patterns are sharp.

The patterns are, also, the thing. Faribault has been working with archive designs going back nearly 100 years, and you can see, in the lookbook, two trends running side by side: the muscular early-20th-century camp blanket — heavy stripes, military-issue olives and grays — and a more modern, restrained set of designs that lean into off-whites and dusty pastels. Both lines look like something. They feel intentional rather than nostalgic. The mill has resisted the pull of "rustic" cliché.

Practical notes. The throw size (50" × 60") is the daily-driver — drape it on a couch back, use it as an actual throw. The "twin" size (66" × 90") is great as a bedspread on a single bed or as a layered top blanket on a queen. Throws run $200–$300. Bed sizes go up from there. Wool is, year over year, getting more expensive globally; do not expect Faribault prices to come down.

Care: cold spot-clean, then dry-clean if needed. Do not put a wool blanket in a washing machine unless the label specifically says you can. Hang in fresh air after travel. A small lint brush kills the occasional pill. Stored well — folded, lavender sachet, cool dark cabinet — these blankets will be perfectly serviceable when your grandchildren are arguing about who gets them.

A small philosophical aside. There is a category of objects — things made well by a small number of people in a small number of places — that exists in increasingly slim supply in 2025. Most stuff in your house was assembled by a robot, somewhere, very fast, very cheaply. Most stuff in your house is fine. Some stuff in your house, though, has the quality of having been made deliberately, by people, with care. The Faribault blanket is in the latter category. Owning a few of those objects, even when they're a little expensive, makes the rest of the house make more sense.

Buy one. Buy a throw, first, before you commit to a full bed size. Sit under it on a Saturday afternoon. The mill, in Faribault, Minnesota, is still running. They could use the order.

This has been Day 94. The blanket is the pick.