A New Bedford charter of 1846.

Wamsutta began as a cotton mill in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a town whose principal industry was then whaling. English Wikipedia says the company was conceived by Thomas Bennett Jr. of nearby Fairhaven, who had worked in a mill in Georgia and had originally planned to build there; the investor and congressman Joseph Grinnell made it a condition that the mill be built in New Bedford instead. The corporation received its charter from the Massachusetts General Court on 8 April 1846, according to the published acts cited by Wikipedia, and at the stockholders’ meeting of 1847 Grinnell was elected president and Bennett secretary. Bennett served as the mills’ superintendent from 1846 until 1874.

The name came from Wamsutta, the son of a Native American leader who negotiated an early alliance with the English settlers of the Plymouth Colony, Wikipedia says. The original mill, a stone building of five storeys designed by Seth Ingalls of New Bedford, went up on the banks of the Acushnet River from 1847; Wikipedia dates the opening to 1848 and the start of cloth production to February 1849, with housing built for the workers. A painting of the mill around 1850 by the New Bedford artist William Allen Wall survives.

Further mills followed in the 1850s and 1860s, and more again after Edward Kilburn replaced Bennett as superintendent in 1874. Wikipedia says production of percale, a closely woven cotton cloth, began in that period. The future textile magnate William Madison Wood started his working life at Wamsutta, working there from 1873 to 1876, according to a 1982 biography cited by Wikipedia. Wikipedia says the company became known for fine shirtings and sheetings and other fine cotton goods.

The company marked its centenary with a book, Henry Beetle Hough’s Wamsutta of New Bedford, 1846–1946, which Wikipedia lists as further reading.

Supercale, Lowenstein, Springs and a retailer.

Wamsutta’s name became tied to bedding in the twentieth century. Wikipedia says that from 1917 the mills were modernised, steam power was replaced with electricity, and a new focus was put on fine sheets and pillowcases, backed by an advertising campaign aimed at the public. In 1935, it says, the company began calling its percale sheets Supercale, and it later made Lustercale, initially a blend of cotton and rayon. The brand’s present-day archive timeline gives the same 1935 date for Supercale and shows a 1920 advertisement presenting Wamsutta as a wedding-registry gift.

The New Bedford company did not stay independent. The textile history site of NC State University’s Wilson College of Textiles says the New York firm M. Lowenstein & Sons broadened its product line by buying Wamsutta Mills, with its garment, industrial-fabric, towel and sheet lines. The New Bedford mill was then liquidated except for the name, NC State says; the equipment moved south, and new Wamsutta mills were built in Anderson, South Carolina.

Springs Industries of South Carolina bought M. Lowenstein next. NC State dates the purchase to 1986, and English Wikipedia says Wamsutta has been a brand of the Springs business from 1985. Springs’ successor, Springs Global, sold the North American rights to the retailer Bed Bath & Beyond in June 2012, according to Wikipedia, which cites a Springs press release; Springs kept the right to market the name in South America. The brand’s own timeline marks 2012 as the start of what it calls Bed Bath & Beyond’s ownership.

That arrangement ended with the retailer. Wikipedia, citing Reuters and Wirecutter, says the brand was discontinued in the United States around the time Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy in 2023; Homes & Gardens, in an article last updated in November 2024, said Wamsutta towels had become almost impossible to find in shops or online.

Design and documentation.

Towels, sheets and bedding are sold mostly through packaging and labels rather than through the product itself. A bath towel usually reaches the shelf folded and banded with a paper wrap or a hang tag, while sheets and pillowcases are sold in a clear bag, a printed sleeve or a card-backed pack that shows the size, the fibre and the colour name at a glance.

Once the wrapping is thrown away, the brand lives on in the sewn-in label: a small woven or printed tag in a hem or a seam that carries the name, the fibre content and the care instructions. For many households that tag is the only place the brand name is ever seen again.

Store-brand bedding adds another layer. A name that appears only in one chain’s stores may be owned by the retailer, licensed from another company or made for it by outside suppliers, and the label alone rarely says which.

Each guide in this group separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — who started the name, who owns it now, where its textiles are made and how its labels and packs have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An Indian owner and a return through the archive.

The name found a new owner in 2024. In a statement dated 19 April 2024, the Indian bed-linen maker Indo Count announced that it had acquired the Wamsutta brand from Beyond, Inc., the online retailer that had taken over Bed Bath & Beyond’s brand assets. Indo Count’s executive vice chairman, Mohit Jain, said the company would explore “multiple channels of distribution” to reach Wamsutta’s customers and to introduce the brand to a new generation.

The relaunch followed in July 2025. Indo Count Global, the company’s United States subsidiary, said it had launched Wamsutta on 9 July 2025 as a direct-to-consumer brand, sold only through its own website, with an updated range of products. Wikipedia, citing a June 2026 Wirecutter review, describes the brand as revived after Indo Count acquired the trademark rights.

The new site leans on the archive. Its history page, headed “An American Original,” sets out a timeline running from the New Bedford mill of 1846 through a winter street scene on North Front Street, the Supercale name of 1935, a 1960s advertisement and the custom fabrics the company says it offered home sewists from 1970. The range is organised by fabric: “Original” Percale, which the company describes as crisp and cool, a sateen it calls Supreme Egyptian Cotton, and an Essentials Cotton line, alongside pillows, blankets, robes and towels. The company says it has “full control of our process, from manufacturing to distribution”; one product description, for a cotton blanket, says it is made in Portugal.

The old mills still stand in New Bedford as buildings. English Wikipedia says the complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in August 2008, and that city officials announced plans in 2004 to redevelop it with loft-style apartments; the Library of Congress holds a Historic American Buildings Survey record of the mills.

For a design guide, Wamsutta shows how a mill name can outlive its mill, pass between owners and return through its own archive of advertisements and fabric names. Compare Peacock Alley, a Dallas bedding brand, and Cannon, another American towel name. For this guide we use harbour navy, faded rose and percale white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Wamsutta’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.