Cooper Hewitt says...
J. P. Stevens & Co. began as a single woolen mill founded by Nathaniel Stevens in Andover, Massachusetts in 1813. Under the leadership of Nathaniel’s son, Moses Stevens, the company grew to be New England’s leading producers of wool fabrics. The company takes its name from his grandson, John Stevens, who started a commission house in New York in 1899, which prospered selling the output of the family textile mills. He also served as a selling agent for a number of southern cotton mills, eight of which merged with J.P. Stevens & Co. in 1946. Further investment in southern mills led the firm to become the second-largest publicly-held textile company in the United States.
The company also moved most of its woolen operation to the south, largely to avoid union organizing. The 1976 boycott of the firm by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU) was dramatized in the 1978 film Norma Rae. In 1988, on what was to be the company’s 175th anniversary, it was purchased in a leveraged buy-out by textile conglomerate West Point Home Inc.
