Weaving a legacy

by Heather Hayes
for Virginia Business
July 2005

Virginia’s textile industry may be fading but its memories are still strong. Bob Harman, whose family worked in the industry for six generations, is preserving those memories in the Olde Virginia Textiles Museum, which opens this month in Pulaski.

The museum will focus on the industry’s mechanical era. It will feature working looms, sheep shearing, weaving demonstrations, a research and restoration laboratory, and historical exhibits. “With the loss of our textile mills to offshore competition in recent years, it dawned on me that, within another generation, people would not even know what we used to do,” says Harman, 61, the founder of Old Abingdon Weavers, which provided fabric for Ethan Allen, Colonial Williamsburg and the Smithsonian Institution. “The industry was too important to Virginia’s economy and culture to forget that easily.”

Gov. Mark R. Warner has supported the project and purchased some handmade placemats for his wife. The museum also has received funding and technical assistance from various public and private sources, including the rapidly diminishing textile industry.

In time, Harman would like to expand the museum to 20,000 square feet, employ 40 people, feature collections of vintage clothing, military uniforms and tartans and offer lectures and weaving-room tours through distance-learning technology. “It’s just going to be a pretty, colorful, fun, educational place to visit.”