Prevailing wisdom and archaeological evidence suggest that we have been wearing clothes for a very long time. Humans have been dressing themselves not only for warmth, protection, and comfort, but also for style, status, and probably pleasure, for at least 34,000 years. The very oldest remnants of woven textiles, which were discovered in a cave in the Caucasus Mountains in Eastern Europe, are sophisticated weaves from fibers that had been dyed turquoise, red, yellow, blue-violet, green, khaki, and pink. The plant fibers were gathered, processed, and manufactured by skilled and knowledgeable people who were part of a culture that carried both the language and the stories to pass on these technologies.
It may come as a surprise that the earliest man-made fibers were not made from wool but instead from the plant that is still cultivated today to make linen. Its likely progenitor, Linum angustifolium, grew wild throughout the Mediterranean region, Iran, and Iraq. Whether wild or domesticated, the flax plant must be processed in steps, each requiring specific timing and terminology, before the long-staple bast fibers can be spun into thread and then, finally, woven. The resulting fabric is lightweight, quick-drying, breathable, comfortable, non-toxic on the skin, easy to dye, and durable. Linum usitatissimum, or common flax, is named for its usefulness and is the oldest cultivated fiber plant in the world.
“Cloth gave humanity the ability to choose their own destiny,” writes Kassia St. Clair in her book about the history of fabric, The Golden Thread (2018). She argues that fabric defines and shapes the world in which we live: From the first swaddling at birth to the shrouds drawn at death, from the layers of cloth within which we sleep to the layers of clothing that make us presentable to the world, the fabric of our daily lives is intertwined with literal fabric. And as that last sentence reminds us, when we speak or write, our words, phrases, and metaphors are woven throughout with reference to making cloth.
Fabric and its component parts are a figurative stand-in for the very stuff of human life. People in ancient civilizations had working knowledge of their local materials and developed the earliest technologies for creating fabric. Everyone would have had some part in the making, transporting, or trading of cloth for all kinds of uses—from containers, netting, and ropes to garments, bedding, and, eventually, sails carrying people to distant lands, along with the books within which these histories are written. Imagine telling tales of daily life, settling squabbles, raising children, and passing on skills and information all while interacting with fiber. It makes perfect sense that the terms common in textile creation are also part of the lexicon and art of storytelling and rhetoric.
The ancient trade networks that developed for cloth also facilitated cross-cultural exchanges of ideas, craft, techniques, and people. Today, fabrics are still shipped all over the planet. Most of the clothes we buy today have crossed several borders, sailed many seas, surveyed different continents, and traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles. In France, a land and people that have strong historic and modern connections with both fashion and linen, the Office of Environment and Energy Management has published a study on the subject. It found that a pair of jeans, from the cotton field to the shop, travels more than 40,300 miles (1.5 times around Earth).
In 2025, we don’t tend to think much about where or how the fabrics in our homes and on our bodies are made. However, the health of our planet is hanging by a thread while people increasingly bemoan a deteriorating social fabric. Are these metaphors at the core of human evolution becoming overstretched, threadbare, and unraveling for modern consumers who have little personal understanding of textiles?
The 34,000-year-old woven fibers discovered in the Dzudzuana cave came from the flax plant. It was a hugely important archeological discovery because, for most of human history, the natural fibers that adorned us returned to the soil from which they sprouted. Modern man-made textiles, however, such as polyester and rayon, will never go away. The textile sector is the third largest source of water degradation and land use today. Textile production, including dyeing and finishing garments, is estimated to be responsible for about 20 percent of global clean water pollution. While some of our unwanted clothes are collected for reuse or recycling, technologies that would enable clothes to be recycled into fresh, “virgin” fibers are nearly non-existent.
These problems are not entirely dissimilar to the problems inherent in the global food system. The question many people are now asking, including some intrepid farmers, makers, and thinkers in Wisconsin, is if consumers’ increasing interest in local food may have set the table for the next deep cultural reckoning. Have locavores and foodies also opened the door for a re-imagined, and revitalized, connection with local fiber production and economies? What would a Midwestern, Great Lakes, or North American fibershed look like? And could it work?
The Re-Emergence of Local Fibersheds
On an unsettlingly warm day in mid-September, Leslie Schroeder led me into the detached garage of her older home in Madison. She left the door propped open, and I could see bundles of dry, brown stalks piled in the corner and on a wooden work table. The flax had been grown in test plots around Dane County, and the small labels on the bundles distinguished them in ways that my inexperienced eyes could not. The bundles were waiting for hands to help process them, but there are very few people in Wisconsin with these specific skills.
Schroeder pulls a strand of plant fiber from a pile and twists it between her fingers as she speaks. She knows a lot about Linum usitatissimum—knowledge gained mostly from books, research, and hands in the dirt. I watched as she ran the stiff but flexible fibers back and forth in her hands and a thread emerged. Between the rough pads of thumb and forefinger, she had created a two-ply string using a simple but sophisticated technique. The resulting rope of fiber is strong and durable. Known as an S-twist, it is two-plied, balanced, and easy to work with. It will not unravel or tangle up on itself. This is exactly how the thread remains found in the Dzudzuana cave were twisted.
The seeds for the bundles of flax in Schroeder’s garage were planted in Wisconsin soils in the spring of 2024. She has been growing flax for her own use for four years using a dependable seed variety imported from Europe. The tall, grassy plants were all hand-pulled 100 days later and then left to ret, or partially rot, in the field. Retting is a crucial stage of flax processing, and it’s one of the major gaps in knowledge that needs to be relearned.
“There’s a terroir to ret flax,” says Karen Kendrick-Hands, whom Schroeder met when she began to test the market interest among the local arts and crafts community. Kendrick-Hands is a knitter and textile enthusiast, as well as an attorney with a long career as a volunteer public interest advocate for environmental concerns. She co-founded the Environmental Sustainability Rotarian Action Group to create a way for like-minded Rotarians to collaborate in mitigating the climate crisis. In 2022, Wisconsin Linen Revival emerged from Schroeder and Kendrick-Hands’s shared interests and started making connections within the growing network of North American flax linen experts. When I spoke with Kendrick-Hands over Zoom, she compared this specialized knowledge to that of a vintner who meticulously observes and cares for grapes.
“I was fortunate to be able to call Alvin Ulrich of BioLin Research in Canada,” Schroeder says when I ask about the retting process. “I sent him a picture of my flax and he could tell just from looking that it needed one more day.” Without his advice, the crop would have been difficult to process well. Too little retting and the linen fiber is hard to remove from the shive (the unwanted outer straw-like material). Too much and the linen strands will be weak and rip easily.
“This is something that you need to follow directions for, and you can fail at it,” Sara von Tresckow says me when I visit with her in November. Schroeder calls von Tresckow a torchbearer of flax knowledge in Wisconsin. The two connected in 2022 when Schroeder was looking for specialized equipment for turning her plant fiber into silky strands of linen.
Von Tresckow’s late husband, Hans, was an engineer and woodworker. He studied the traditional tools necessary for small-scale flax processing and designed building plans with detailed directions for the modern DIY flax enthusiast. The husband-and-wife team founded The Woolgatherers to serve a niche market for spinning and weaving equipment that makes “fiber pursuits more pleasurable.” The business was based first in a small town in northern Germany, then on a farm in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Von Tresckow recently moved to a modern downtown Madison apartment, where I met her. Several large looms fill two of the three bedrooms, and one of her self-designed weavings hangs over her kitchen table illustrating a distaff, a scutching board, a ripple, a set of hackles, a mangle board, as well as the word for linen in German, French, and Dutch. Three-fourths of the world’s production of scutched flax fiber comes from Western Europe, where von Tresckow learned to work with the plant.
The know-how of farmers and producers in the northern coastal lands of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (latitudes a bit north of Fargo, North Dakota) is rooted in centuries of relationship with the plant. After harvest, farmers bale the flax and transport it to the scutching mill, where workers operate specialized machines to extract the fiber and sort the materials. One hundred percent of the plant has use and is valued.
Von Tresckow hands me samples of woven cloth while we talk. The samples were made from the same harvest of her homegrown flax, and each piece of fabric demonstrated different levels of processing. One was coarse and unrefined, like something you might imagine as a rustic feedsack or dishcloth. Another was smooth and soft, with a sheen that reflected light.
“Working with flax requires Fingerspitzengefühl,” von Tresckow emphasizes repeatedly, using a German word that describes an instinct that is felt and understood through the fingertips. For more than forty years, von Tresckow has offered individual instruction to students who want to learn about spinning, dyeing, and weaving. She sells plans for the flax equipment Hans designed on average twice a week via the Woolgatherers website.
Many fairy tales of European origin are familiar to Americans and feature spinning flax as core plot-points. As we flipped through Flax in Flanders throughout the Centuries: History, Technical Evolution, Folklore by Bert DeWilde, which is one of hundreds of books in von Tresckow's extensive personal library, she says that she worries Americans don’t understand how much knowledge and experience are required to farm and work with the flax plant. For von Tresckow, it’s important that imagining the future for this fiber isn’t a simplistic Disney adaptation of an ancient story.
The Woolgatherers’ customers may find inspiration in the traditions brought to this country with European settlers, but perhaps less well-known is the period in history when Wisconsin farmers grew flax commercially to meet the market need for local fiber. Historian Jerry Apps writes in his book, Wisconsin Agriculture: A History, that during the Civil War, when access to southern cotton was restricted, the U.S. Congress appropriated money to spark innovation in the fiber industry. Congress hoped northern factories would find inexpensive methods for spinning flax fibers on the existing cotton machinery, and American flax companies distributed free flax seeds to Wisconsin farmers, along with contracts to grow the crop. The encouragement worked, and by the end of the century, Wisconsin was growing fourteen thousand acres of flax. Flax mills and linen production also gained a foothold during that period, with a dozen mills in Wisconsin at the height of the era. “Flax was grown mostly in eastern Wisconsin and especially in Ozaukee and Sheboygan counties,” writes Apps.
The last of Wisconsin’s linen mills operated in Green County until 1907. “The industry was heavily reliant on protective tariffs, which ebbed and flowed with political changes,” Schroeder says about the subsequent decline of flax production in the state. Ultimately, American-grown flax couldn’t compete globally and production faded, as did an American cultural connection with linen.
It is this piece of U.S. history that another flax revival project, the Pennsylvania Flax Project, is focused on. Founded in 2020, the Pennsylvania project aims to provide new revenue streams for hundreds of farmers and to build a modern system for processing it into fabric to meet the world market demands and standards. The organization has received a large Organic Market Development Grant from the USDA to put their ideals to the test. According to the project’s website, “In our vision of the future, work is meaningful. Economic opportunities heal the Earth. And an American linen industry thrives based on healthy soil and profitable farms.”
Other groups in North America, most collaborating and building momentum as members of the North American Linen Association, have similar hopes for their regions. Wisconsin Linen Revival, which has evolved under Schroeder’s direction into Midwest Linen Revival, is proudly one of the broader association’s first members.
Schroeder says that Midwest Linen Revival’s work involves more than just planting and growing selected strains of flax seeds provided by the USDA; it is also about education, outreach, research, and development. In 2024, the group held three field days, four hand-processing workshops, as well as many talks and outreach events. The bundles of flax in her garage brought together volunteers to plant seeds, assess test plots, and hand-pull the plants. Some of this year’s flax straw has been sent out of state for experimental processing, some of it will be used in next year’s workshops, and a limited quantity is available for sale to fiber enthusiasts.
Over the past two years, Midwest Linen Revival has been working with Steffen Mirsky, the Emerging Crops Outreach Program coordinator for the University of Wisconsin–Extension’s Crops and Soils Division. Since the office’s inception in 2021, two staff members have supported faculty and academic staff who are doing research around the state. “Together we form a team, and we try to find commonalities and ways of working together on these new crops, because they all have similar needs, or overlapping needs,” Mirsky says.
Mirsky came to the position from Seed Savers Exchange, a seed bank based in Iowa that serves as a hub for a large network of people and organizations committed to seed diversity. He values collaboration that extends beyond the university and has created an emerging crops coalition that includes governmental agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, as well as the state’s economic development agency and nonprofits like Midwest Linen Revival. He believes the various sectors can work together to address challenges.
For a new crop like flax, the market must be built at the same time that growers are introduced to the possibility of adding something new to their farm plan. The Emerging Crops Outreach Program includes flax because it could make both economic and environmental sense for Wisconsin, Mirsky says. Flax matures quickly so it can be included in rotation with other vegetables or cereals or after intensive rotational grazing. The high seeding rate suppresses weeds and, once pulled, leaves a clean field. This means herbicides are not generally needed and fields are improved, or remediated, from a rotation with flax. Flax also needs little water and usually doesn’t require irrigation.
For Mirsky, the additional, or perhaps even the main, value of flax “is the environmental benefit it brings to the textile industry.” One challenge flax faces, he says, is that there are no faculty in the University of Wisconsin System who have chosen to focus their research on flax. Crops like hazelnuts and hemp have the benefit of researchers with grant funding who are working to understand their potential in Wisconsin’s soil, growing season, and market.
And all of this is why Schroeder’s work is especially crucial. She is a member of Wisconsin Farmers Union and connected with flax farmers who collaborated during the recent growing season. Bundles from those plots were waiting in her garage when I visited, all tagged and ready for hands that know the ancient magic of making stiff plant fibers into silky, golden strands of linen.
From Farms and Fields To Finished Garments?
“We’re going to need a lot more of these or we’re going to be dressing kinda skimpy,” Schroeder says with her typical wry humor while handing me the S-twisted cordage in her garage. She frequently receives calls or emails from people asking where to get a garment grown and sewn entirely in Wisconsin. “That’s why education about fiber production and systems is part of this work, because people don’t quite understand how much truly goes into making finished cloth.”
Anyone who spends any time with Schroeder can tell that she is smitten for linen. An interest in learning to cook well for her young family led her to gardening, meeting local farmers, and eventually buying a foreclosed farm. Before long, she was also learning to forage, hunt, and studying ancient skills, like how to process hides and tan buckskin. Then she took a workshop at the Low Tech Institute in Cooksville, Wisconsin, and it all clicked.
“I felt like a treasure had been hiding in plain sight my whole life,” she says. Some of Schroeder’s ancestors came from Pomerania, a historic region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea in Central Europe, divided between Germany and Poland after World War II. In the 1850s, a large migration of Pomeranians moved west to Wisconsin during the lumber boom. She grew up going to Old World Wisconsin, an open-air museum in Waukesha County, where she saw flax grown in the Old World garden used to demonstrate how a ripple, brake, and scutching board worked in the Pomeranian exhibit.
“I like to imagine my people came over to the New World carrying the wealth of their culture literally in the seeds in their pockets,” Schroeder says. Almost anyone from Northern Europe likely has ancestors who were involved with flax production. In a typical village, everyone would have touched the crop at some point in the year. And for Schroeder, this personal connection with history helps her tell a story in her workshops that points forward, to a future where people can buy and wear sustainably grown local fiber, beautiful fields of little blue flowers are home to happy pollinators, and we remember the magic of sequestering carbon in our clothing. Attending to her connection with the land has helped to give her a sense of belonging, she says, and hope that a local fibershed could offer that for more people who feel disconnected and untethered.
The path for flax in the Midwest is still far from being paved, but one recent advance came through collaboration with Wisconsin Farmers Union members. The union is a lobbying organization that offers guidance and encouragement to farmers while also increasing political will and public awareness. At the union’s annual convention in December, they presented a resolution to support “developing regional and regenerative natural fiber textile systems on behalf of producers invested in our bioregional economy.” This language, which was passed unanimously, invigorates the conversation about fiber farming in Wisconsin with specific asks, including a call for a position within UW Extension for a fiber flax outreach specialist.
And the public, too, is starting to tune in. Flax fiber may have more than a 34,000-year-long history with humans, but it’s also having a moment with trendsetters today. “Get over the fact that it wrinkles and enjoy the characteristics of a natural fiber,” Kendrick-Hands says, confident that planet-friendly linen can win new fans. “The flax plant was the plastic of the 1600s. Our lust for easy, cheap, miraculous oil is what displaced the flax plant.”
Kendrick-Hands recently attended an exhibition organized by Parsons School of Design’s Healthy Materials Lab in New York City that encouraged designers, architects, and engineers to consider the potential of flax. Titled “Regeneration of Flax: Linseed, Linen, Shive & Oil,” the exhibit included a bundle of flax from Schroeder’s garage. “Flax is a superplant providing us with linseed oil for floors and paints, fiber for textiles, and a range of products from the flax stalk,” says Alison Mears, Director of the Healthy Materials Lab. The exhibition demonstrated industrial applications and innovations that take advantage of the ‘super’ plant’s vibration absorbency, electromagnetic transparency, and heat-and sound-insulating properties.
For Schroeder, the story in Wisconsin may not be linear, a word that reminds us yet again of linen’s connection with the pages of human history, as flax thread was used to determine a straight line. Perhaps handmade textile enthusiasts will popularize backyard flax gardens, while a Wisconsin-based agricultural company invests in innovative processing equipment.
“I’m just going to keep inching things forward and see where these old seeds take root in the land I call home,” Schroeder says.
