12/06/2024
Amazing story. I love the spirit of how all this started and am excited to see where it goes. I would 100% wear local linen products.
🌾 Long after the sweltering heat of summer is a distant memory, Heidi Barr is still thinking about light and airy linen — or at least about growing flax, from which linen is made.
Barr, a textile artist and costume designer, first became intrigued with the fiber when she was looking for a local linen supplier for her home textiles company and came up empty-handed. Not long after, local farmer Emma de Long contacted Barr and asked her to make her a linen wedding dress, and the two went down a rabbit hole researching domestic linen production. Barr discovered that flax seed first came to the United States with the Dutch and German settlers of Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood just 10 minutes from where she lives.
During the pandemic, the two planted a test plot of flax at de Long’s vegetable and flower farm, Kneehigh Farm in Pottstown, Montgomery County. They consulted with growers from the North American Linen Association, and in 2020 they started the PA Flax Project to organize farmers and create an infrastructure to bring the industry back to America.
In January 2024, they were awarded a three-year, $1.7 million U.S. Department of Agriculture Organic Market Development Grant to grow flax for linen and other coproducts on 12,000 acres in the state using a cooperative model where farmers would share in the profits.
➡️ Learn more about the PA Flax Project’s mission to revitalize the flax industry at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2024/12/01/with-the-help-of-a-sizable-grant-farmers-are-rebuilding-the-long-lost-pennsylvania-linen-industry/
✍️ Kathleen Nicholson Webber
📸 Zoe Richardson