BLANKET (that is ((fine goods), a heavy bed or horse cover, of a fabric with a thick soft nap on both sides. Originally made entirely of wool, and still so in the finest grades, most of the medium and cheap blankets are now made with a cotton chain or warp and a wool filling, as cheaper, stiffer and almost as durable in good condition. In the finest grades of American blankets, the filling is Australian wool, the longest and softest fibre known; the warp of American wool. The cheapest ones have for filling the shorter combings of wool, shoddy, etc.; ordinary horse blankets the same or still coarser half-cleaned wool, and largely animal hair. Of late also an immense quan tity of all-cotton blankets are made, the nap be ing cotton wool; these have competed less with wool blankets than with comfortables, whose sale for a time they cut in half. They are used fbr economy, where heavy blankets are not needed, and to replace cotton sheeting in cold rooms for children, etc. The most famous blankets in the world are those of the Mysore in India, so delicate that one 18 feet long can be rolled inside a hollow bamboo. In the United States they are a specialty in southwestern In dian domestic manufacture, especially among the quite civilized Navajos (q.v.), whose rough hand looms and stick shuttles .turn out blan kets weighing 20 pounds or more, and selling for $1 and $2 a pound, much prized by Alaskan and Klondike gold-seekers, also by tourists, as well as for decoration on account of the rich coloring. But of civilized manufacture, the finest are from California, Nevada and Oregon and from Minneapolis; some of these retail for $25 per pair with a weight of less than 10 pounds. Maine, Ohio and West Virginia also produce very fine goods. Below the above fancy price, of which much is loading for short runs, prices range for all-wool blankets from highest usually kept in stock, down to gO, and for cotton-warp down to $2, all cotton, $1. Few blankets have been imported into this country since 1860. The early manu facture here was Ca series of costly and futile experiments,)) except a few coarse ones for army or navy use and for slaves on plantations, for which in 1831 a mill was started in Pendle ton, S. C.; another to make blankets
was opened in Buffalo the same year. But the first effective attempt was under the ' sharp tariff of 1842, soon swept away by the moderate one of 1847. The tariff bill of 1857, however, which formed one of the Southern counts for secession, taxed imported blankets so heavily that by 1861 importations had practically ceased. In 1860 the United States' total manufacture was 616,400 pairs, mainly in New England, Pennsylvania and California. In 1880 this had increased to 4,400,000, gross value $6,840,000, and the prices had dropped so much that the cheaper grades had gone out of use; the foreign commissioners at the Centennial of 1876 re ported that for weight, thickness, softness and perfection of surface nothing in Europe com pared with the American, and that the Euro pean cheaper grades could not be sold even to the Indians. But competition had so glutted the market that in 1878 a great auction was held in New York to clear them off, at heavy sacri fice. In 1890 the manner of report was changed to square yards —20,793,644 of "house blankets'. valued at $7,153,900 and 5,507,074 of horse blankets, $1,721,516. For some reason, probably the larger use of comfortables, the use of the all or part-wool article fell off heavily in the last decade —to 18,155,505 square yards, valued at $5,200,959— though horse blankets increased to 7,315,304, valued at $1,740,988, or about the same as before. The chief seats of manufac ture were Pennsylvania for all-wool, and Mas sachusetts for cotton-warp, though Indiana, Minnesota, California and several other States furnished large quantities.
The nap is formed in the finest grades, and till recently was so altogether, by pulling up the fibre with teazles; these have now been replaced in the cheaper makes with steel teeth or brushes on revolving cylinders, which, however, are too inflexible and liable to tear the goods to be trusted with expensive ones. The use of Jac quard patterns with two or three colors, in of printed ones, is another change which popularized blankets by increasing their beauty. Consult Hollister, :The Navajo and His Blanket> (Denver 1903).