Click here to go to Along The Mohawk #24 and check out our interview with Thistle Hill Weavers

If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, you may remember the president wrapped in a dark wool shawl in several scenes.

What you probably didn’t know is that the shawl has a remarkable connection to our area.

Thistle Hill Weavers in Cherry Valley, operated by textile historian and master weaver Rabbit Goody, created the reproduction shawl worn by Daniel Day-Lewis in the film.

The shawl wasn’t simply something dreamed up by the movie’s costume department. Abraham Lincoln really was known to wear a dark wool shawl to keep warm, and the original survived long after his death. Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, eventually gave his father’s shawl to a friend, and it later became part of the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

When it came time to recreate Lincoln’s world for Spielberg’s film, the production needed textiles that looked and felt like they belonged in the 1860s. That’s where Thistle Hill Weavers came in.

From their mill in Cherry Valley, Rabbit Goody and Thistle Hill specialize in reproducing historic fabrics using traditional weaving methods and equipment. Their work is based on research into original textiles, patterns, fibers and colors, allowing costume designers to use fabric that looks much closer to what people actually would have worn in the period.

For Lincoln, that work included recreating the distinctive shawl worn by Daniel Day-Lewis as he portrayed the 16th president during the final months of his life.

And Lincoln was far from Thistle Hill’s only brush with Hollywood.

Over the years, the small Cherry Valley weaving operation has provided historically accurate textiles for numerous film and television productions. Their work has appeared in productions including There Will Be Blood, HBO’s John Adams, The Gilded Age and many others.

It’s a detail most of us would never think about while watching a movie. We notice the actors and the sets, but somebody also has to get the fabric in a coat, dress or shawl right. That’s the kind of work being done at Thistle Hill.

And sometimes those details are being made right here in our own backyard.

So the next time you see Daniel Day-Lewis wrapped in Lincoln’s dark shawl, remember: a little piece of Cherry Valley made it all the way to Hollywood.