Gordon Osborne Papers

Gordon Osborne was textile pioneer who played an important role in the development and the history of the US textile industry, his career in textile manufacturing spanned over six decades and a wide range of diverse textile applications and processes. He was born in India and raised in Canada and the U.S. Mr. Osborne received a B.S. from the Lowell Technical Institute and an M.S. and Ph.D from the University of North Carolina, followed by an economics fellowship at Harvard. He joined Warwick Mills in Rhode Island in 1934 and became president and treasurer of the company in 1948. Mr. Osborne continued to spearhead the company's evolution after the war, leading the charge to produce sail cloth, kevlar, industrial fabrics, and even the cloth for a vehicle that landed on Mars. He continued to have a major role in the company well into his 70s and 80s. Osborne was also the Chairman of the Northern Textile Association (now part of the National Council of Textile Organizations), representing New England's cotton, wool and manmade fiber textile industry. Gordon and his wife Marjorie were avid supporters of textile scholarship, including the former American Textile History Museum, in particular the museum's research library which bore his name. Mr. Osborne died in 2000 at the age of 93 and was posthumously inducted into the American Textile Hall of Fame in 2008.