Made in Canada by the Mohawk Company...
... it is beginning to show signs of wear.
The distinctive stripes on the blanket are the symbol of The Hudson's Bay Company - Canada's oldest business, still in existence - though it's now called the Bay.....
Originally a British fur-trading company established in 1670, long before Canada was a country, the Bay still thrives as a department store.
(The crest on the gift card package above dates back to the company's fur-trading days.)
The stripes on the blanket are a kind of "logo - that is still in use today. I'm not sure when (or why) a fourth stripe was later added. The striped blankets began to be traded and sold around the year 1800.
The HBC website gives a brief history of the blankets, and this article in Wikipedia has an photograph of a pile of blankets with three stripes.)
The online photograph in the Wikipedia article also shows blankets in red and green. My mother has a green one too.
Recently walking through the Bay in Ottawa, I noticed the Bay stripes on umbrellas and other products as well. It made me wonder: Who created this old - but still very modern - logo?! I wonder if anyone knows...
Hi, Marlene.
ReplyDeleteI can answer this for you. The first order for striped HBC blankets in 4 colours was placed in 1780. The colours were specified but the order was not. The modern order of green / red / yellow /indigo - as read from the centre of the blanket to the edge - as not standardized until about 1850. We have never made a 3-stripe version.
Your blanket, while clearly inspired by the traditional HBC mutltistripe pattern - is not an HBC blanket. Ours carry the HBC label, featuring the HBC Coat of Arms and the woirds Seal of Quality. They have never been made with overcast stitching (or satin bindings, for that matter) on the edges. And finally, HBC blankets have always been made, as they have from the beginning, in Britian.
Mohawk was a Canadian maker of pointed blankets (i.e. blankets with points to denote the size) from about 1940 - 1955. One assumes that their blanket featured only 3 stripes so that they would not infringe on HBC's Canadian trademark protection, which was for the 4-stripe design.
Regards,
Joan K. Murray
Corporate Historian
Hudson's Bay Company
joan.murray@hbc.com