The Lost Coast Spinnery doesn’t look like much from the outside. It’s a small warehouse in Fernbridge, known mostly as home to the longest poured concrete bridge in the world.
Inside, though, the warehouse is filled with fiber. Bags and bags of wool litter the ground, all in various states of processing.
“Sadly, most of it's mine that I bought,” says Cate Edwards. “I have a fiber fetish, it's a bit bad. I love fiber.”
Edwards and her husband, Shawn, used much of their life savings to open the mill in February. Edwards says they packed up their stuff, including her large collection of books, sheep and horses, and moved here from Kentucky to start this venture. Edwards is originally from Boston, and says she fell in love with the West Coast.
"You literally have the perfect geological setup to grow some of the best wool in the world.”
“The whole Pacific Northwest, if you look at it in so far as wool, you have the coastal, foggy areas that gives you medium to almost fine,” she says. “And then you have the mountainous, dry areas that gives you fine wool. You literally have the perfect geological setup to grow some of the best wool in the world.”
Edwards won’t stop talking about wool. Her days revolve around the stuff. But sheep weren’t always a part of her life. She grew up in Boston and earned degrees in fine art and anthropology.
“If you wanted to know how many CCs a Neanderthal skull was, I could tell you that off the top of my head,” Edwards says.
Her “wicked bad” allergies sparked her obsession with sheep. A friend recommended she try using a wool pillow, which got her thinking about wool and sheep in general.
Edwards says she adopted some sheep to help mow the grass on their property. Before long, she was researching sheep genetics and how to preserve breeds with unique characteristics. Now, she has 33 sheep with names like Princess Buttercup, Agnes and Kyle.
“I like the difference in size and personality,” she says. “I like the difference you get in fiber. They're all wildly different with different end uses.”
Tracing Humboldt County’s wool roots
Edwards dug deep into the history of wool in Humboldt County. She learned that when settlers arrived in the 1800s, they experimented with different crops and livestock to grow here. Sheep won out, especially among Basque immigrants, who brought herding expertise from the borderlands of France and Spain.
“A lot of them moved here because of the climate. The area was open,” she says. “They could have their flocks feed without having any grains.”
Herders could also supplement the sheep’s diets with dried seaweed to boost their protein and mineral intake.
Wool production in Humboldt County reached a high of 500,000 pounds a year, according to the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka. A third of the land in the county was dedicated to raising sheep.
Most of the wool was processed at the Humboldt Bay Woolen Mill in Eureka. But, Edwards says the rise of cheaper synthetic fibers and the growth of the wool industry in countries like China, New Zealand and Australia spelled a death sentence for Humboldt County wool.
The mill shut down in 1966, and the building was demolished in the 1980s, despite efforts to save the historic structure.
Why small wool mills matter in a global industry
Today, most wool is shipped overseas for processing. California produces millions of pounds of wool each year, but Edwards says less than 1% of it is processed in-state.
“The rise in small mills has come about with a lot of hand spinners, a lot of knitters, and with traceability,” she says.
Luxury brands are taking note. Ralph Lauren sourced wool from central Oregon for Team USA’s Olympic outfits in Paris.
She says traceability and humane treatment of sheep are becoming more important for consumers.
Designer Stella McCartney dropped a supplier in Argentina after finding sheep were being mistreated.
“That can be worth millions to a large-scale operation,” Edwards says. “So traceability is not just marketing, it's ensuring what you sell as an end product was humanely and ethically created.”
At her mill, Edwards works with smaller ranchers — some with just one or two sheep. She says it can be nearly impossible to get wool processed by large overseas operations that require minimums from 100 to 5,000 pounds.
“Like this lady right here,” Edwards says, picking up a bag full of raw wool. “She doesn't have the equipment. She doesn't have the soap.”
The specialty soap runs $400 to $500 a gallon. Edwards charges customers $5 a pound to wash their wool.
“So she gets a good deal, I make a little money,” Edwards says. “Everybody’s happy.”
The high cost of starting a wool mill
Turning raw wool into yarn isn’t simple. Each step — from opening, stretching and aligning the fibers to steaming and spinning it into yarn — requires its own specialized machine.
Most of the equipment must be imported. She says some of them, like a knitting machine from South Korea, start at $160,000 a piece.
“It's really prohibitive to start this,” Edwards says. “I'm still not sure if it was a good idea. It was so expensive.” She grabs a skein of finished yarn and admires it. “But the end result is this. And this yarn is absolutely gorgeous.”
“We pretty much put everything we had for over 30 years in the bank, and we saved it, and that's what allowed us to do this."
The last U.S. maker of mid-sized spinning equipment shut down in the 1940s, she says.
“So you have some mills that are running – and God bless them – they're running equipment from the 1880s to 1920,” she says.
If something breaks, the mills can’t just order a new part. They have to machine or commission the part from scratch. “There was one girl, she had a fly guy over from England to actually fix something.”
Edwards says she’s lucky to have her husband, Shawn, with her. He worked for a car company for 26 years.
“It's equipment, and I like working on equipment,” he says. “So it's right up my alley.”
Cate Edwards says without someone like Shawn, it would be impossible to keep the place running. It also helps to have his wallet to help pay for things, she says with a smile.
A legacy woven from wool and savings
“We pretty much put everything we had for over 30 years in the bank, and we saved it, and that's what allowed us to do this,” she says. “Had we had a more normal lifestyle of, ‘Let's fly here for the summer. Let's go to Jamaica for a couple of days.’ There's no way we could have done this.”
Lost Coast Spinnery had its grand opening at the end of May. Already, people are sending them wool from all over California and even the rest of the country.
“We both know we’re not going to live forever,” she says. “So when I get wrapped up in a mushroom suit and he chooses to do whatever he's going to do when he is done, this will roll into a trust.”
Edwards says she wants this mill to continue supporting small ranchers long after they're gone.
“I'll be dead. I won't know,” she says. “Hopefully it'll be successful, but I don't want all the work and all the money we did to just stop when we do.”
Her goal is simple: leave the world less crappy.
“I know it's kind of silly and I'm a little overenthusiastic about it,” she says as she grabs some fine, almost spider-web-like wool from the carding machine. “But when you think that this probably came off some rain-drenched sheep that was wandering on a field, just munching on grass, and you wind up with this beautiful fiber that can make someone a glorious sweater or a baby blanket or a wicked nice wool coat. It's like a superpower.”
