Last week the board went to a bootmaker whose own pages named the wrong Maine town. This week it goes to a mill that names two states correctly, in the one place on the page you would not think to look.

Until 2022 this company was Faribault Woolen Mill. It is now Faribault Mill, and the word it dropped is the honest one to have dropped. In March 2022 it bought Brahms Mount, a cotton weaver in Monmouth, Maine. Textile World reported the deal on March 29, 2022, said Brahms Mount would carry on in Monmouth with its existing staff, and reported the rename as reflecting the expanded product range. That was the plan on day one and I have not found a dated source on how the Maine headcount has moved since, so take the continuity as reported intent rather than as a figure. A woolen mill that starts weaving cotton in another state, and takes "Woolen" off the door, has told you something before you reach a product page.

The history behind it is real and it is documented outside the company. MinnPost, Dave Beal, September 15, 2011, on the morning the mill reopened: it "began operating in 1865, the year the Civil War ended, and was closed in July of 2009." It restarted that day with about thirty workers, roughly seventy percent of them former mill hands. So the line from 1865 to now is 161 years long and it is not 161 continuous years, and that two-year gap is the most interesting thing about the place.

Now the labels. Their product descriptions are specific and they are good. Of the 311 listings in their /collections/all feed this morning, twenty name Faribault or Minnesota next to a making verb, in sentences like "woven on our looms in Faribault" and "Proudly made in the USA at our mill in Faribault, Minnesota." Thirty one name Maine, in sentences like "Woven in Maine from pure, 100% cotton" and "Woven at our mill in Maine." A further 111 match on USA or America without naming either state. Matching rule, so you can run it yourself: a making verb (woven, made, knit, sewn, crafted, milled, loomed, finished) within 45 characters of the place name, matched against the description text with the HTML stripped, and an item counted in the first bucket it matches.

Three things about those numbers. The Maine bucket is bigger than the Minnesota one, on the website of a Minnesota mill, and that is the number I did not expect. The remaining 149 get no bucket here and no claim from me: this feed does not carry the collapsed tabs, so a listing missing from all three buckets may simply have its origin somewhere the feed cannot see. An absence in product data is not evidence, which is a rule this newsletter wrote in August after Origin, Quoddy and Rancourt all caught it out in one morning. And the counts are a census of their writing, not of their looms.

Then there is the tab. Their product pages carry a collapsed tab marked ORIGIN, and I opened it on three of them this morning. On the Northfield Plaid Wool Blanket, woven in Faribault, it reads: "Proudly made in USA since 1865. Interested in seeing for yourself how our blankets are made? No Golden Ticket required to see our Factory. Take the opportunity to visit one of the last vertical woolen mills in America. We offer tours of our historic Mill every weekend, giving you a chance to see history in the making." On the Penobscot Cotton Throw it reads the same. On the Frontier Cotton Throw it reads the same again. Both of those are woven in Maine, about 1,150 miles from the mill the tab is inviting you to tour, in a straight line.

Nothing there is false. All three items are made in the USA and the tab says so. The catch is that on these pages the tab marked ORIGIN is the one place that cannot tell two mills apart, while the description, which is marked nothing at all, names the state every time. A reader who opens the tab labeled with the question they are asking gets a company history. A reader who ignores it and reads the paragraph gets the answer.

Buy first: the Mississippi River Wool Throw, $199, down from $245, 42 by 65 inches. The description ends "Proudly made in the USA at our mill in Faribault, Minnesota," which is the full-strength version of their claim, with the town in it. The page read "In Stock & Ready to Ship" both times I looked. If you want the Northfield plaid instead, read the last section of this issue before you click.

That discount was not there when I wrote this. I checked these prices at five o'clock this morning and again just before this went out, and in between Faribault put most of the catalogue on sale: 260 of its 309 listings now carry a struck-through price, with no announcement bar and no name on it. The throw above moved from $245 to $199. Nothing else in this issue moved, and I have said in each entry when it was checked.

Five, each read on the rendered product page this morning rather than in the store data. The flag means the product page names a US place of making and discloses no foreign content. No flag means it does not clear that bar, and the entry says why.

One disclosure before the list, because a regular reader would catch it. Neither this week's cover maker nor the first pick below is new here. Faribault Mill and Rancourt both ran in the September 4 Shop, twenty five days ago, as markdowns: Faribault's Monhegan Cotton Throw at $145 and Rancourt's Westfield Boot at $258. Different items this week. The Rancourt below is at full price; the Faribault throw above was at full price when I wrote it and went on sale a few hours later, which is its own small lesson. That September 4 entry is also where this newsletter first printed the words Brahms Mount without following them anywhere. This issue is that follow-up.

🇺🇸 Cup Sole Penny, Burnt Chiptan Bison, Rancourt & Co., Lewiston, Maine. $298. The best single origin sentence in this week's five, because it answers a question this newsletter has had to leave open twice this month. "Each pair is handcrafted in Lewiston, Maine using Burnt Chiptan full-grain American Bison leather." Town, and the hide. We put the whose-leather hole to White's a fortnight ago and to Aurora before that; Rancourt closes it in one line on a $298 shoe. D width only, ten sizes offered, and the page itself greys out 9 and 13 and leaves the other eight selectable. I checked that on the rendered page rather than in the store data, for reasons the last section of this issue is entirely about.

🇺🇸 Motorcycle Sweater, Black and Old Gold, Dehen 1920, Portland, Oregon. $375. The Origin tab on the product page reads "Made in Portland, Oregon USA," and unlike the mill above, this catalogue does discriminate: on other Dehen items the spec bullets name the cloth's country outright. The Flight Vest in Indigo Sashi-Ori says "100% cotton Sashi-Ori fabric produced in Japan" and the Dehen x Gitman oxfords say "Cambridge Oxford cloth milled in Portugal," both on the listing, and you can check either in a minute. Extra heavy four end jersey knit, 100% worsted wool, vintage Talon zipper pull. They say they are the only original maker of the 1930s club sweaters still making them. What the page does not say is whose wool. It showed 4 in stock on the size it loads with, out of a run from XS to XXXL.

Easyweight Men's Classic Flannel Shirt, The Vermont Flannel Co., East Barre, Vermont. $88.80. No flag, and the company is the one that tells you why. Two separate bullets in its spec list: "Finest European flannel fabric" and, lower down, "Hand cut & sewn in the USA." A Vermont flannel company whose flannel is European cloth, cut and sewn here, put in the spec rather than in a footnote. That is the correct way to make a qualified claim. The paragraph above those bullets says "Timeless plaid, American-made pride," which is the marketing; the bullets are where the cloth gets a continent. Four plaids, Back Road, Campbell, Black Watch and Earth, XS to 2X, and all 24 combinations were live this morning.

🇺🇸 Down Italian Vest, Black, Crescent Down Works, Seattle, Washington. $445. The Italian in the name is a cut. The page closes "Made in Seattle, Washington USA." Water resistant 60/40 cotton and nylon shell, 5 oz of 700+ fill power goose down the page calls "Ethically-Sourced" without naming a country, YKK zipper, leather snap reinforcement. All six sizes from XS to XXL were live this morning in black. The olive one is sold out and offers to email you instead, which the last section of this issue has something to say about.

Adjustable Anchor Wrap, Mystic Knotwork, Mystic, Connecticut. $23. No flag, and this one is a rule I am applying to myself. The page says "Handmade Adjustable Anchor Wrap, Made in the USA," which names a country and not a place of making, so it does not clear the bar I set at the top of this list. Mystic, Connecticut is in my headline because it is the company's town, and supplying a town the product page does not say is the exact move the last two issues were written about. So: country from the page, town from the company, and now you know which is which. What the page does give you is better than most origin lines: "We are live-aboard sailors and everything we make in our shop could be made aboard as we travel," and the anchor design is credited to Christa, described as the fourth generation knot tyer in the family. Stainless steel or solid brass, fourteen colours, $23, and the page was taking orders this morning.

Still no Shop on Friday, and that remains a decision. The most recent one is the Labor Day discount that never shows on the page, from September 4, so every price in it is now twenty five days old. Check it before you act on any of it. The nearest thing to a deal this week arrived on its own: Faribault marked most of its catalogue down a few hours before this sent, and that is written up in the Buy first section rather than here, because a Wire I have not verified end to end is exactly what this slot is resting from.

The store data says it is available. The page says it is not. Three times in one morning. Every Shopify store publishes a machine readable feed, and plenty of you pull it, because two of these issues have told you to. This morning it disagreed with the page on three of the six sites in this issue, each time in the optimistic direction. Faribault's Northfield Plaid Wool Blanket reports all four sizes available in the feed; the page says it is out of stock and offers to weave you one by November 25. Rancourt's Camden Derby reports all fifty variants available; the page says "This item is not in stock but will be made for you in approx. 10 - 12 weeks. We will contact you with an estimated delivery date after your order is received." Crescent Down Works' olive Italian Vest reports all six sizes available; the page offers to email you when it comes back.

None of this is deception, and the fix is not to distrust the feed. A made-to-order shoe genuinely is orderable, and the feed has no field meaning "orderable, in three months." The same field is doing two jobs. What it is safe to read out of store data is that a company will take your order; what it takes a rendered page to tell you is when the thing arrives. The Cup Sole Penny above is the other half of the test, and it is why that pick is in this issue: its page greys out the two sizes its feed also calls gone, so there the two surfaces agree and the number means what you would assume. You cannot know which kind you are looking at without opening the page.

One page, two strengths of the same claim, six lines apart. Rancourt's Belgrade Camp Loafer opens with "Made in Maine, USA with heritage domestic and imported materials," which is the qualified form and the correct one when not all the content is domestic. Then its own Features list ends with a bare "Made in Maine, USA." Same page, same shoe, same screen. The Federal Trade Commission's standard is that an unqualified claim needs all or virtually all of the content to be domestic, so the first sentence is the careful one and the bullet is the loose one. I do not think anybody is hiding anything here; a spec list and a description are usually written by different people at different times. But if you are comparing two Rancourt shoes, the description is the sentence to trust, and the Cup Sole Penny above carries no qualifier at all.

Every item above was verified for country of origin this week, September 29, 2026. The whole board is public and searchable at registry.quarterboard.co, every maker labeled and dated. No brand paid to appear. Some links may become affiliate links; that never changes what gets picked.

P.S. Faribault took a word out of its own name when the thing it made stopped matching it. I would like to collect more of those: brands whose name no longer describes what they make, and who changed it rather than letting it ride. Reply with one and I will print the best.

Until next time,

quarterboard.co · @quarterboardco