A weaving company started in the wake of Bates of Maine’s departure keeps Lewiston’s textile heritage humming.

LEWISTON –

When Fred Lebel started Maine Heritage Weavers five years ago, he was hoping to keep the tradition of Bates bedspreads alive and the people who made them employed.

Profits were a distant dream.

But last year, the fledgling company recorded its first profits, and this year it expects to add another loom while eyeing a new pool of potential customers: well-heeled alumni of Yale University.

Maine Heritage Weavers has introduced a throw and a bedspread woven with a giant “Y” that is featured in the Ivy League university’s catalog.

“We should know in a week or two how that’s going,” said Lebel. “There are 140,000 Yale alumni, and we estimate we’ll get 1.5 to 2 percent response from the catalog. That’s pretty significant. If that materializes, we’ll have to go out and buy additional looms.”

Today, the company runs six looms, a three-fold increase over the pair Lebel first started with in 2002, and has doubled its workforce to 14. Once an industrial engineer, then a plant manager, Lebel had risen to president of Bates of Maine when the company’s owners announced that they were closing the mill and shipping its equipment to Faribault, Minn., in 2001.

Determined to preserve the heritage of renowned Bates bedspreads – which had been manufactured at the Bates Mill since before World War II – and to keep its expert weavers employed, Lebel began Maine Heritage Weavers on his own.

His more than 40 years with the company gave him an almost encyclopedic reference for the designs and process of weaving bedspreads. He purchased the two looms from Biddeford Textiles, then the special Jacquard heads that modify the looms to produce the intricate weave patterns of Bates-style bedspreads. He set up shop next door to the Bates Mill in about 20,000 square feet of the Hill Mill.

“This was once a textile mill, too, so it’s used to the vibrations,” said Lebel, as he escorted a pair of visitors through the mill. Four of the six looms were whirring away, transforming huge spools of cotton yarn into the famed bedspreads.

Lebel is careful to call them Bates-style bedspreads. When North American Heritage Brands closed Bates, the Minnesota-based manufacturer kept the Bates name and the trademark styles. So the famous Martha Washington-style bedspread and its Colonial garland and flowers motif that is made by Maine Heritage Weavers is sold as Martha’s Choice. Bates’ “Heirloom” style is Lebel’s “Heritage” pattern.

Maine Heritage Weavers is the latest permutation of the historic Bates Manufacturing Co., which put Lewiston on the map when it opened in 1850. By 1857 it was turning out more than 5.7 million yards of high-quality cotton goods and was winning prizes in Maine and Massachusetts for “best pantaloon stuffs” and “best plain and fancy cotton fabrics,” according to the company’s centennial brochure.

But its owners wanted to diversify, and in 1858, the looms began producing bedspreads. The product line grew, fortifying Bates against the slow exodus of textile makers to the South after the turn of the century and through the Great Depression.

In 1935, Lewiston’s Henry Goulet invented a process to make candlewick fabric (woven cloth with decorative patterns of French knots – the same technique used on the new Yale bedspreads) on the looms. The bedspreads, beginning with the George Washington, proved so popular that Bates Manufacturing decided to launch its own sales division, Bates Fabrics, in 1937 to grow the bedspread and home goods lines.

Bates Manufacturing was where Lebel learned his trade. It pained him when the company foundered and cut corners, such as using inferior yarns, in its final years. And that’s why he’s so happy to have a chance to make Bates right again with Maine Heritage Weavers, even though it’s under a different name.

“It’s very satisfying,” he said. “The bedspreads were always well received in this country. We want to continue to do what Bates always did. Bring back the best yarns, the best quality, the best price.”

Lebel stops at the first loom on the mill floor. Peach- and ecru-colored yarns are being pulled from separate directions like shafts of light that meet on the loom’s surface. Eighteen feet above the loom is its head: the part of the loom that “reads” a pattern from holes punched in stiff paper cards that feed endlessly into the loom. Wherever a hole is punched in the cards, a hook can reach through and grab the yarn and pull it to the other side; where there is no hole, there is no loop.

It takes about an hour for a loom to produce one of the intricately woven matelasse bedspreads such as the Queen Elizabeth. Up to 10,000 punch cards – folded in a thick accordion pleat like an old computer printout – will go through the head and 10,000 separate threads combine to produce the medallion-centered spread.

Simpler spreads, such as Martha’s Choice, use slightly fewer threads because they are knotted candlewick-style and use much thicker yarns. When finished, a queen-size Martha weighs about 8 pounds.

“It’s still one of our most popular styles,” said Lebel.

But he’s not banking the future of Maine Heritage Weavers on Bates’ past. Upstairs from the looms toils Leonard Davis, a textile designer. Working with software, he creates new designs that will keep the inventory fresh. One of his recent innovations is a Betsy Ross bedspread design that uses trapunto – a puffed pattern traced with decorative stitching – that was being woven on a downstairs loom.

“We used to use graph paper and fill in the design by hand,” he said. The evidence hangs about 10 feet from his desk, where the original George Washington paper pattern sketch is framed.

“The newer looms have digital capabilities and there are no punch cards,” Davis added, noting that if the college logo bedspreads take off, the company might have to go digital to produce asymmetrical designs.

It would be a pleasant problem to have, said Lebel. Right now, the company’s products are being sold via retailers such as Country Curtains and Vermont Country Store, and on its own Web site, www.batesmillstore.com. They are also sold at the Bates Mill Store Outlet on Lisbon Street, where a king size Queen Elizabeth matelasse runs $200 and a twin goes for $120. A small selection of slightly irregular spreads are available at a discount.

“We get a lot of mothers and daughters in here, with the mom saying to the daughter, ‘Which one do you like, because you’ll get it when I’m gone,'” laughed store manager Debbie Littleton. She said she’s noticed a lot of young professionals who want a bedspread with heritage and quality as they set up their first homes.

“They’re tired of fake, they’re tired of chintzy,” said Littleton.

Lebel hopes word spreads. One shift of workers produces about 400 bedspreads per week, said Lebel. If the college orders come through, he expects to add a second shift along with the two new looms.

“Our biggest problem is that people know Bates is gone, but they don’t know about us,” he said. “We’re still at it!”