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.