Plate No. 104fabric
Coarse, husk-flecked utility cloth.
- First documented
- 1700s
- Origin
- Osnabruck, Lower Saxony, Germany
- Fiber
- cotton, flax
- Weave
- coarse plain weave
- Family
- plain
Plate No. 104 · fabric
Osnaburg
Osnaburg is a coarse, plain-woven utility cloth, originally a German flax linen and later a cheap rough cotton, flecked with husk and slub. Its history is sober: in the American South, cheap osnaburg was the cloth most often issued to enslaved people, a fact the fabric's name still carries in plantation records and account books. Stripped of that context the same coarse cotton survives as sacking, workwear, and a fashionable rustic homespun, but the catalogue notes the harder history the cloth came up through.
Named for
Named for Osnabruck in Germany, where the coarse linen was first made.
Also known as
oznaburg
Modern equivalent
The closest cloth in this catalogue you can source today.
